Hack It!
by ImmortalObsession
Summary: Voldemort is the brilliant, ruthless heir of a crumbling criminal empire. Amateur computer hacker Hermione Granger has to do volunteer work at Azkaban Prison, or else her dream of going to Duke is taking a one-way ticket down the toilet. But as Hermione learns this handsome murderer has more in common with her than she thinks, the rising mob war becomes the least of her worries...
1. Rats

**AN: AH, AU, TOMIONE. **

**If any of the above words in any shape, form, or octagon offend you, then you need to gtfo. ;P Also, swear words in this story won't be hidden in acronyms or described as _something that sounded suspiciously like "crass mat"_, despite the T-rating. (Teens swear. A lot. Ask Dr. Phil.) **

**Not that this story will be loaded with bad mouthing no-goods! No no, dear readers! Not at all!**

**Sassy Hermione, yes. Tat!Tom, hell yeah.**

**Ok, so clearly this is my newest Tomione story (and IMO my favorite). If any of you have read my previous works and are expecting the most disturbing, dark Tom Riddle a depraved weirdo comme moi can post on the Internet, then this might be a disappointment. Or maybe not. _Hack It! _is my first Tomione fic led by a Strong!Hermione, who I feel I can finally depict with justice...at least, the way I picture the toughest Hermione possible in modern-day Queens...and this Tom is different. I can't really explain it. I'd rather you just read the damn thing. **

**Pwease? :3**

* * *

"Strange as it may seem, men…of certain grades of intellect and temperament deliberately devote themselves to lives of crime."

- James McCabe, Jr., _New York by Sunlight & Gaslight, 1882_**  
**

* * *

FBI WARNING: ILEGALLY DOWNLOADED MATERIAL HAS BEEN FOUND ON YOUR PC. THIS IS A FEDERAL CRIME. YOU ARE NOW BEING MONITORED VIA WEBCAM.

At the back of an outdated 60s diner hastily converted into a cybercafé in Queens, NY, Hermione Granger groaned. Customers waiting for Oprah's iced chai tea, and whip cream vanilla lattes glanced over, miffed by the interruption of their complicated orders yet simultaneously nosy enough to try to see what the sleep-deprived 18-year old with hair management issues was up to. Hermione noticed and shot the closest brown noser in line, a man with chic square glasses and hair gelled to look like the victim of a cyclone, an evil look before hunching back over the cruddy DELL laptop on the table.

ILEGALLY DOWNLOADED MATERIAL HAS BEEN FOUND ON YOUR PC_. _

_ Oh really? So the FBI makes typos regularly these days?_ Hermione thought at the message with a scathing quirk of her lip, opening the system recovery folder after a moment of navigating the C: drive and indistinguishable muttering. Windows XP was decidedly an ugly, ancient and inefficient beast. It also figured, she speculated, that half-decent conmen couldn't make authentic government threats these days. Hell, her three-year old cousin wouldn't fall for this garbage. Or maybe deforestation really was altering the fate of the universe and all that extra carbon dioxide from butchered trees was going straight to computer nerd's heads worldwide?

While the hard drive wiped itself clean, she pictured it, calculus textbooks scattered around a desk and diabolical snorts galore as some friendless geek leered at the latest Apple product, eagerly awaiting a new victim to send money directly to his bank account – right before he atom bombed their computer 21st century style.

_What an asshole, _she thought ironically, for admittedly this was the height of hypocrisy, coming from her.

After all, where Asshole's nefarious malware and spams infested the Internet like a bad case of tapeworm, she breezed past security networks and hijacked varying forms of digital to do odd jobs for paying customers all across the state. All jobs were mostly innocent tasks of course, like changing grades for a class assignment…or the less innocent, such as taking over computers, tracking bank accounts, getting invaluable code, and crashing networks.

It was a risky business, but it was this or double shifts at McDonalds and paying rent late every month.

She'd much rather be a hacker.

With – ironically – her own antivirus called _MalgitX_.

_ 58% complete, _the screen read during the reboot. _59%...63%..._

Hermione looked around, frowning at the unisex restroom _kingwood9_ disappeared inside ten minutes ago and wondering at the state of his bowels. She shook her head, slouching down in the squealy chair some more while the basic softwares re-installed. School had ended an hour ago and she'd come straight here, the usual meeting place for her occasional in-person requests.

This hole in the wall, the Three Tithes, liked to call itself a cybercafé in hopes of attracting some younger patrons, when in actuality the only _cyber_ thing about it was the free Wi-Fi supplied by the Laundromat next door, and the bran muffins that looked like disabled robots if you studied them. Despite so many positive factors, the café earned a slightly different reputation than it intended when the _h _and _e _in Tithes on the sign out front stopped lighting up in the late 80s.

A regular here since she first started coming in freshman year, Hermione knew the place well – from the faded image of Elvis Presley wallpaper just behind the cheap paintjob, to the dent in the checkerboard floor someone forgot to swap out when they decided to renovate. Coincidentally, she'd discovered her knack for technology in the same year she discovered the cybercafé. An elective requirement at her old public school had given her the option of taking either a low-grade art class or cosmetology course, and since she rated makeup products somewhere around the level of elephant dung and Sundance horror movies, Graphic Arts with Photoshop won out.

The class was virtually easy: show up, do a project, click-click-click for forty minutes. Hermione was bored out of her mind, but her teacher praised her for her excellent classwork, suggesting she learn a bit more about the subject and teach a weekly class on computer basics at the local library for senior citizens. An overachiever by default, she hadn't been able to resist the opportunity to build up her college application and impress a teacher. Besides, she'd been going to the library ritually since she was a little girl - more so when Dad died and Mom got that loser boyfriend, _Mundungus_, who deals anything you can poison your insides with on the shadier side of Harlem.

So why not make something productive out of her self-imposed isolation?

The research was simple. She learned what she needed to teach the class (which wasn't much more than common sense), and then some to pass the time (which there was a lot of). As Mom started forgetting to pay the utilities bills and the money Dad left them dwindled down to hundreds, however, she realized she couldn't afford to waste her time doing community service anymore. She needed a real job. But how would she get one? She was only fourteen, she couldn't work anywhere substantial for another two years.

So she got…creative.

Through an online software she'd forged a new birth certificate and working papers that would pass a chain restaurant's quick inspection. Online night courses on programming were paid for by the extra money left over from rent. Mom had still been lucid enough to be functioning back then, inventing a sob story about how she couldn't get a job because of back problems, and the government began to send them lousy monthly disability checks. At first, Hermione had been furious when she found out, more so when she learned Mom only got the checks so she could pay for the heroine, not the bills. But they were to the point where fraud was the least of their problems.

There wasn't enough money, even with the food stamps. There wasn't enough time, not with the extra hours or neglected homework, or skipping school to cover someone's shift when she didn't sleep last night. Outside of normal studies, Hermione slaved over books on network defenses and operating system holes, codes, encryption, security, access control, cracking passwords; anything about computers she could get her hands on. Control over a world – albeit a virtual one – fascinated her, for whatever reason. And months later, it came down two things: getting her hands a little dirty, or dropping out of high school to work a minimum wage job for the rest of her life.

Thus, Gryffindor was created.

Gryffindor, Hermione liked to think, was her rebellious side. She came up with the username when she stumbled across a website on Greek mythology. The Ancient Greeks believed in a creature called a hippogriff: a hybrid of a bird and horse, with the upper body of an eagle. It supposedly symbolized love, as its parents the griffin and mare were mortal enemies. Hermione took a liking to that description for reasons she keeps to herself, but was dismayed when she tried to use it and the web server informed her the username was already taken. After a little editing, Gryffindor was somehow born, and quickly became one of the most obscure and efficient hackers in New York.

"So can you fix it?" Gryffindor's latest client, Kingwood9, said. He was back from the rendezvous to the restroom, sucking Hermione out of her thoughts with a snap.

"I'm not the Geek Squad, you know," she retorted, tapping the scratched cover of his lousy laptop emphatically. "I don't usually fix computers, I _break into_ them."

Kingwood9 grumbled (it took a focused mental effort not to read into his username) in response. His real name was Rubeus Hagrid, but Hermione had christened him _Neanderthal_ the minute he walked through the door of the shop, scratching the razor cuts on his fleshy jaw and muttering perplexedly as he mustered the café around him from behind the blinding shroud of snarled black dreadlocks on his head. Presently Neanderthal cleaned off a set of thick-rimmed glasses on his grease-stained sweatpants, squeezing them onto his wide face and shifting forward to squint intently at the PC screen.

"I didn't know who else to call," he confessed, voice rumbling out of his chest like a mix of bear growl and chain smoker. But he didn't smell like cigarettes – he smelled like McDonalds. "It just showed up last week and I shut the thing off immediately, because I didn't want those government creeps watchin' me or somethin'." His large frame shuddered, with what Hermione gathered was either fear, or whatever kept him in the bathroom so long earlier. "I can't go to jail again," he whispered fiercely, eyes glowing, "my mom said she won't bail me out this time!"

"Don't worry. I already fixed it." Seeing the relief on Neanderthal's face, Hermione didn't bother to tell him the break-in was never even a genuine threat, although she did add, "It'll cost you."

"How much?"

"One hundred eighty, cash."

"Holy– Listen, I work at TOYS R US. I stock the shelves with Barbie Merpeople dolls and Lord of the Rings action figures. How much do you think I make, Gryffindor?"

"Enough to request me." She checked the clock. "Sitting here, you already owe me another five bucks."

"The f-?"

"Going on ten. I charge interest, by the way, so if you don't pay me here you'll just owe me more."

"Alright, _alright_." Neanderthal slapped down his pastry aggressively enough to shake the broken table. Customers looked around at the commotion, scanning the curvy girl in an oversized hoodie with a prehistoric laptop, and the whining forty-year-old-slash-yeti sitting across from her with interest. "I'll pay, yeesh. Do you take checks?"

"Do I look like an idiot?"

"Er…credit?"

"Are _you _an idiot?"

He sighed heavily. "I only have fifty on me and I get paid next Thursday."

"Interest it is." Hermione cracked her knuckles and leaned forward, logging onto the user account without having to ask for a password – how predictable, it was his brother's name– and within ten minutes, Hagrid's DELL was once again restored to its virus-free settings. It just kept getting easier, she mentally marveled. "Do you want the MalgitX?" she asked, feeling suddenly charitable.

"Is it free?"

There went her sporadic sense of optimism. "It's one of the best antiviruses in the tri-state area," she replied curtly. "Of course it's free. I'll even pay for that flourless cheesecake you're eating."

"You're quite snippy in-person, you know."

"I've got NEWT exams coming up," she quipped, but he was right. Hermione and Gryffindor were different people, however. For instance, at school Hermione would never exhibit half this much courage among her peers, much less utter the word _idiot _in her imposing Chemistry teacher, Mr. Snape's, presence. He'd probably have Filch, the crazy janitor and self-proclaimed Director of Detentions, hanging her by her toes in the auditorium for a week. But people you met online were more often than not shady, failing to make money transactions a week after the job was done, and sometimes flat out saying they weren't going to pay her – or they were just perverts. She learned that the first semester of junior year.

Now Gryffindor had a Taser. And kickboxing lessons. Or at least, three kickboxing lessons supplied by a free one-month trial membership at the YMCA. When she was eight.

She really needed to make some friends.

"What are NEWTs?" Neanderthal asked curiously.

"They're like the state-required exams, the Regents," she said distractedly. "Except impossibly more difficult." And required by her new rich-kid school, Hogwarts, which she only attended thanks to scholarship, as fate would have it.

"Can I get a discount? Please?"

Hermione paused. She thought of the bag of cat litter she needed to buy for Crookshanks, and the 72-hour notice for electricity shut-off that had been taunting her for the past two and a half days. "Alright," she finally said, reluctantly. "Ten percent off."

Neanderthal didn't look pleased, but he didn't argue any further as she slid a disc into the DVD-rom and made a few absent clicks. He probably wanted to get out of there before she expended the rest of his savings.

"Done," she announced, popping open her messenger bag to get out a heart-shaped wallet with a Hello Kitty zipper. Neanderthal looked between the offending object of girly origins and her completely un-girlish self incredulously. She ignored him. "That will be two hundred thirty dollars and seventy-eight cents."

"What's the cents for?"

"Tax." Actually, it was for the Hershey's bar she was going to buy on the way home. But Neanderthal didn't need to know that.

Mumbling something about smart ass inner city kids, her customer grudgingly handing over a fifty and some mysteriously sticky quarters. She tucked both away. "That'll cover some tuna cans for my Kneazle," she said. "By the way, I'll be monitoring your bank account and tracking your computer history, so don't try to buy any Star Wars collector items on Ebay or whatever it is you do in your spare time before you pay me, because I'll know. I also want my money by next Friday, right after you cash your paycheck at Bank of America at about 4:15 PM. …And if I don't get it, your wife will receive some very telling messages shared between you and Madame Maxime."

Neanderthal turned stark-white, eyes wide and disbelieving. "How the hell-? Did you-? That's not any of your- Wait, wait, you're _blackmailing_ me? I thought you were, like, twelve!"

"Eighteen. And yes, I am." She had the decency to look apologetic, for even if Neanderthal was a strange middle-aged man who spent too much time on French porn sites, he hadn't done anything bad to her. He could though – and Hermione had to protect herself. Better yet, Gryffindor had to. "Think of it as an opportunity to learn from your mistakes," she added, trying to be encouraging.

"And you charge interest." He dropped his head in his hands, groaning. "Effing FBI! I'll never download torrents again…"

Sympathetically, Hermione patted his enormous shoulder on the way out. "I'll e-mail you the bill." Gryffindor was, after all, eco-friendly.

The bell hanging above the door didn't ring at her exit, having lost its ability to do so when the batteries died in 1973. An elderly gentleman seated near the window display watched Hermione Granger walk down the street through the glass. His neat silvery hair and pressed suit suggested he came from a better-off area, like Tribeca or upper Manhattan. His amused grin was unmistakable.

He took one last sip of the cheap, tasteless coffee and strode out the door.

* * *

A week had gone by, yet the men sent to carry out the contract still hadn't returned.

Voldemort cursed under his breath, viciously. What the hell was taking them so long? Did they get lost? Preoccupied by a field of pretty flowers, smoke too much crack and drive headlong off the side of a bridge? At this point, the latter option was preferable to what awaited them if they returned without the job done. Just wait until they crawled back, expecting payment and getting a new hole ripped for them instead. _Incompetent idiots, _he thought, glaring out of the car window_. _This was exactly why he avoided working with the low-level men; they had bullets for brains, if they had any brains at all.

And now he was the one stuck doing dirty work.

The sleek black Cadillac Voldemort usually used was dismissed in favor of a lousy Volkswagen, which sputtered and wheezed all the way into the vast countryside of upstate New York. The car was average enough to be discreet, but also barely functioning. They'd already stalled out five times on the interstate.

He rolled down the window, gazing out at a wilderness so untouched and ancient it wouldn't be altogether surprising if an Algonquin Indian was glimpsed darting through the thick redwood trees, on the chase after a deer that would mean a week of meals and clothes for four seasons.

They were deep inside the forest-entrenched Adirondacks after three hours on the highway and a bumpy navigation on unpaved roads, winding along distant towering mountain ranges and still green lakes that peered in and out of blurred countryside at intervals. The driver, Peter Pettigrew, was an insignificant button man far down on the social pyramid who went by the nickname _Wormtail_.

"We're almost there, sir," Wormtail said suddenly.

"I can see that" came the razor sharp response. Wormtail flinched in the front, his nose twitching as if he had the violent urge to sneeze, while his skinny lips flew back from his bad teeth and fluttered like the whiskers of a mouse who's caught the scent of old cheese. It was a bizarre reaction and made Wormtail appear extremely rodent-like.

"Sorry," he said hastily, pawing at his runny nose – but he shouldn't have replied at all.

Cocking his head with renewed interest, Voldemort scanned Wormtail's reflection in the rearview mirror: Wormtail had a weak chin, flabby neck, tiny dark eyes, and crooked teeth. The man dearly needed braces. Or a muzzle.

"Wormtail," he called, and the man's head nervously poked up. "I have a question."

"Yes, sir?"

"I was just wondering," he said, leisurely draping an arm over the top of the driver's seat, and enjoying the nervous flush that crept over the back of the button's neck at his closeness. "Why it is you seem so familiar?"

"Sir?"

He snapped his fingers. "There! Right _there, _the way you looked just now_. _You looked just like this dead rat I once saw in London." Abruptly, the Volkswagen screeched to a stop, and Voldemort waited while Wormtail jimmied the key until the engine made a feeble cough, and they slowly inched back into motion. That stall, however, didn't seem to be the car's fault. He smirked. "See, I was waiting for the train in this filthy metro station downtown," he went on, "when I looked down at the tracks suddenly and saw a giant rat, the size of a basketball, lying motionless on top of them. The ugly thing had probably just been run over by the last tram, but that sort of thing happens in the rundown areas all the time. I was there on a holiday, you know. An odd place to go for vacation though, isn't it? London? I much prefer somewhere with sun, like the Saints or Hawaii. But then, the Pacific Ocean is _so _cold…"

"Th-that sounds lovely, sir."

"Oh, I went off on a tangent, didn't I?" Voldemort said apologetically, smiling at Wormtail with an unnerving number of perfect white teeth. Wormtail gulped, trying to focus on the road. "My point is, you remind me very strongly of a rat," he prattled, propping his chin up on one fist. "Personally, I find rats highly irritating. They're more pest than animal, don't you think? And their reproduction rate is incredible; the average female rat can produce up to 285 rats per year, and there's roughly an average of 48 million rats in New York alone. That's 6,840,000,000 baby rats in one city. But where did the other six billion and some rats go?"

Wormtail bit his lip and looked uncertainly at the handsome man in the backseat. Voldemort raised an eyebrow expectantly. "They, um, died, sir?" he guessed.

"No, they did not _die_, Wormtail," the young man said flatly, his voice suddenly as cold and frigid as the arctic. Wormtail recoiled. "They were killed by subway trains, food poisoning and pest killers, left to rot with the rest of their disgusting kind." He paused, letting that sink in. "Now…do you want to be a rat, Wormtail?"

Mutely, Wormtail shook his head.

Voldemort's smile turned cruel on the serrated edges. "Then learn how to keep your mouth shut," he hissed.

They didn't speak again for the rest of the drive.

Once Voldemort exited the car, the Volkswagen jerked around and floored it, leaving behind a tornado of dust winds stinking of gas and a soon-to-be mob boss all alone on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere.

Voldemort shook out his jacket, covered in a fine coat of dirt once the wind had died down, and he thoughtfully examined his tinted Ray Bans, which were just as suddenly moth brown as the rest of him. Autumn was cold and wicked this far upstate. He hadn't been standing outside for two minutes and already he could feel the threat of winter slithering into his bones, numbing his fingers like a biting Novocain as whistling wind shook a rainbow of leaves out of the woods. He obviously hadn't come properly dressed. He clearly didn't belong out here at all.

Getting to work without another second wasted on scenery, he got off the road and began to hike a green hill rising out of the ground like a swollen hip, half a mile ahead of him. His Italian leather shoes crunched the parched brown grass under their polished heels in muffled clicks, and although his cellphone appeared not to get any service here in no man's land, he kept one hand on it out of habit.

Looking over the hill once he reached the summit, Voldemort saw nothing but dense wildlife and a vast horizon of endless mountains, dotted by scales of thousands of plush pine trees. He looked down and found a rundown little farmhouse he'd only ever seen before in surveillance pictures, the shabby fortification overridden by ivy, mostly disintegrated, and surrounded by a field of rampant weeds. It was the poster boy of a safety inspector's Uninhabitable Houses list.

He knew better than that.

He made his way toward the decrepit shack of a house, kicking through the snarled vines and thorny bramble that clung to his tailored pants like static electricity. His cold eyes zeroed in on the bouquet of decomposing snakes nailed to the door when he was close enough to see it, and he winced, lip curling. _Disgusting_. Also, a sign of his blood relative's mental decimation, which was nearly as bad as the shitty house he lived in.

_ No, not quite that bad, _he thought after a moment of reflection. Uncle Morfin was much farther off the deep end than his neglected farmhouse after all. Peering around the lonely property, Voldemort considered his uncle's lacking mental state like a bittersweet metaphor. A mental state bad enough for him to have murdered the last two trained hoods Voldemort had sent here, for the 60-year old man to take a perverse liking to snakes, to threaten to kill his sister because of the man she loved decades ago, and be strangely obsessed with black magic to this very day.

Could he really be related to someone like that?

The disappointment punched him in the gut without warning, as potent and terrible as it was the first time he found out his only living blood relative's psychosis was rotted as a skeleton in the grave. Suddenly Voldemort was stormed by the urge to smash his fists into something made of metal, to kick brick walls, tear them down, and build them back up just so he could rip them down again. _What a waste, _he thought, all at once enraged and devastated. _What a fucking waste._

He grabbed a stick and used it to bat aside the serpent husks, swarming with ravenous flies and maggots. He entered the farmhouse easily, pushing open the unlocked screen door, and walking in to find the outside had been warmer than in here. The flower-wallpapered walls stank of mildew and a musky scent that could only be called age.

Looking around, Voldemort felt as if he'd just stepped inside a hoarder's paradise. The first room he saw was stuffed with mountains of old clothes that reached the ceiling, and all around him was so much junk there was hardly any room to breathe, much less stand. What was oddest of all, however, was the mysterious jarring sound of what seemed to be slamming metal – _WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! –_ coming from the other side of the house.

Quietly, he picked his way through the filth and followed the noises, until they led him to a cluttered kitchen. Cobwebs, moldy food, and junk virtually covered every inch of the room, and a terrible stench that made his stomach churn gurgled out of the pantry. Glancing at the half open pantry door, he saw there were wire shelves behind it, all strung and laced with sagging, scaly bodies, like popcorn garland on a Christmas tree. His stomach rolled.

Then there was the man, slapping an iron skillet and soup pot together over the antique woodstove as he sang in a warbly, off-tune screech.

"_Hissy, hissy, little snake__  
__Writhing on the floor._  
_You be good to Morfin_  
_or he'll nail you to the door!"_

His uncle burst into wet, hacking laughter.

Voldemort deliberated. Morfin, his last known biological relative, had taken eight years of hired hands and intense research to track down. The vacation to London he'd spoken to Wormtail of in the car earlier had actually been an expedition back to the boy's orphanage Voldemort grew up in until the age of nine, when he was adopted by Cygnus Black, his foster father. He'd returned to it years ago, intending to find information about his real family and their whereabouts, but the woman who had run the orphanage when he was there was long dead and gone by the time he arrived. She'd died from a premature heart attack, and the new matron didn't know anything about him or his parents. Conveniently, there had been a kitchen fire fifteen years earlier, which burned up half the building and sent numerous children's files up in smoke. Including his.

So imagine his supreme pleasure, when he'd finally found a lead on one side of his family through DNA testing and a "friend of the family" working in forensics sciences. He'd been able to trace his biological mother, Merope Gaunt, and her family. She was dead, but her brother Morfin Gaunt was not, and he even lived locally in the boondocks of NY.

He was also a lunatic.

Morfin Gaunt – damn the crazy coot to the coldest pit of hell – knew nothing of the outside world, or Voldemort's family history. And aside from what was probably schizophrenia, he had multiple birth defects, including bulging eyes that stuck out of his head like a toad's and could never focus on one thing in particular (or point in one direction). Morfin was about to leave this world, however. Permanently.

"WHO ARE YOU?" bellowed Morfin, having turned around and dropped the pot of headless reptiles he was presumably serenading in shock at the sight of a young, well-dressed man standing at his kitchen counter. "WHAT ARE YOU DOIN' IN MY HOUSE? GET OUT, YOU FILTHY, DIRT-VEINED MUDBLOOD!"

_ Mudblood? _Voldemort thought, staring at the old man in bemusement. _What the hell is that?_ His heart hardened with disgust, wondering how he could possibly share DNA with this repulsive freak of nature. "I'm here," he replied in a voice that could cut ice, "to put you out of your misery, Uncle Morfin."

His uncle leered at him, although one could hardly tell since both his eyes pointed in different directions, and most of his face was hidden by a dense tangle of greasy hair probably infested with lice. "I ain't related to the likes of you, ye stinky Muggle," he growled menacingly.

Voldemort arched a brow at him.

"_Hissss essspasssssis nisssy fisssss ssschisss wissstissshissss-"_

_ Oh brilliant, now he's speaking in tongues._ Perhaps he was one of those Christian extremists? Or was he having a seizure?

"What are you saying?" he snapped, once it became clear the hissing thing wasn't ending on its own.

In answer, Morfin picked up a cutlery knife and fingered the dull, red edge of it. "You don't speak it?" he asked in a syrupy croon, although it was unclear whether he was talking to the knife or Voldemort. "Not a Parselmouth, eh? You _are_ just a no good Muggle, not of my heritage, no way, no how… _Isssrasss isssni quisssteeknisss._"

"Parselmouth?" he repeated blankly. "What is that, reptile language or something?"

"_Avada Kedavra!" _Morfin suddenly roared, and he hurled his blade, which hit the broken fridge on the opposite side of the room. The throw was terribly off target thanks to his lacking eyesight. Voldemort blinked at the fallen knife, lying about fifteen feet away from him.

When the delirious old man's supposed nephew didn't fall to the floor dead, Morfin screeched in outrage and rushed him, shrieking what was surely unflattering words of choice in _Parseltongue_.

"_Issspasss eehesss nessshassshnasss quesss-!"_

In a fluid movement, Voldemort raised his .22 caliber, flicking off the safety and pulling the trigger as naturally as he drew breath. Morfin froze, the ear-piercing crack of a shot that had hit home echoing through the haunt eerily. He sputtered, rancid breath divulging Voldemort's senses before the young man gently pushed his chest with the lava-hot tip of the gun. His uncle swayed like a pendulum – just for a moment – before his body crashed to the floor with a jaw-jarring thud.

Dead as a rat in the metro station.

"That," Voldemort said softly, "was for my mother."

Thirty-five feet away, the front door suddenly crashed open. _"Police!"_ a man yelled across the house. "_Do not move, Mr. Riddle. We know you are armed and we have the entire property surrounded."_

Voldemort froze.

It took approximately forty-five seconds. Approximately forty-five seconds for the squad of police officers to rush in, to see dead Morfin with a bloody knife in his hand and an untraceable gun three point five feet away from him, Voldemort himself slumped against the fridge stemming the blood of a nasty wound in his abdomen that would surely need stitches, for someone to dial the paramedics, for Detective Kingsley to come forward and bark "Where is he? Show me where he is!"

The detective looked around with the vigilance of a hunting dog, his sparking brown eyes landing on Voldemort quickly, and he growled, reaching back into the crowd of officers to yank out a scuttling body. Stumbling forward, Wormtail stared up in fear at Kingsley, then at Voldemort.

"Y-y-yes?" he stammered.

"Is this him? Tom Riddle?" Kingsley demanded, his deep baritone voice commanding and thunderous.

Wormtail – the screwed, traitorous bastard – cowered but nodded, avoiding Voldemort's amused gaze and quietly squeaking, "You can ask the other two. They'll tell you the same."

_ The other two? _Voldemort thought, laughing good and hard inside. Oh, so he'd been double-crossed by his cronies and a cab driver, had he? Turned into the law enforcement to be whipped into shape? As if any authority could hold him.

_ Oh Wormtail, you are a dead rat indeed._

"That won't be necessary," said Kingsley calmly. He sounded triumphant, as if pleased with himself for catching one of the biggest names in the criminal underworld in the act. Voldemort fought back more laughter. "Yours is all the confirmation we need, Pettigrew. You'll be relocated and vigilantly protected, although we'll probably call you back to testify for the trial."

"'The trial'?" Voldemort repeated, speaking for the first time and pairing the question with a cocked inky brow.

Kingsley raised his head and his dark eyes narrowed, seeing right through the young man's pretty face and superficial injuries. He straightened. "Oh yes, Tommy boy," he said with relish, eyes on Voldemort. "_The_ _trial_." The detective bared his teeth in what was less a grin and more the snarl of an alpha wolf. "You're serving time, and I'm going to make sure you stay behind bars for a long, long time, Riddle."

Voldemort merely smiled in response. Jail time, he could handle. A trial? Fine. Kingsley was human, and no Witness Protection Program would save his little informants from the wrath of a crossed mobster. Especially the son of Cygnus Black, one of the biggest mobsters of them all. The only question was: who paid _his_ followers so much cash that they backstabbed the Noble Blacks family so blatantly? Not someone living on a local law enforcement salary, that was for damn sure.

Minutes later, as Voldemort was being shoved into a squad car head-first with his hands cuffed and pinned behind his back, the answer hit him. _Of course._ The culprit behind this little dastardly scheme was so obvious now! It was one of the largest, most nefarious mob families in the western hemisphere; the Noble Black's longtime rival, and Voldemort's newfound nemesis.

The Three Brothers family.

His brain worked fervently, but he made himself comfortable in the cruiser backseat, glancing out of the window and sending Wormtail a savage grin once he caught his eye. Distinctly, he mouthed, _Rat. _

The police cruiser pulled away from the curb, but not before he saw Wormtail turn green and double over, throwing up on a patch of browned dandelions and some fed's feet.

Voldemort was still laughing, when they pulled up to the courthouse.

* * *

**AN: Please review and of course thanks for reading. Also, follow me on my tumblr if you'd like to see _Hack It! _graphics and me embarrass myself. Link is on my pro-pro.**

**Kisses!  
****ImmortalObsession**


	2. Busted

**AN: Sorry about the delay, but now that _Broken Hearts on Canvas _is complete, I can officially devote all of my time to _Hack It! _(Yayyy!) Thanks also to everyone who reviewed/favorited. It's particularly awesome to hear so much helpful feedback on a new story. **

**Now if you please, prepare for some serious sassing from Miss Hermione Granger this chapter. Or like, every chapter.**

**(The sass is real, friends. Real is the sass.) **

* * *

_Two weeks later_

"…And so, it was an ironic turn of events when the King of France, Louis XIV, was beheaded by his own invention La Guillotine, to the immense joy of his bloodthirsty subjects," Mr. Binns concluded. His iconic drone – a dry, colorless instrument of auditory torture – could lull an entire army of peeved _bourgeoisie _to sleep, Hermione thought. Today, it was tormenting a classroom of twelfth graders.

"His wife, Marie Antoinette, was also executed," the teacher went on dully, "while wearing a famous diamond necklace said in myth to have been given to her executioner just before her beheading. She bribed him to make her death as fast and painless as possible, instead of the sloppy mess usually seen at these executions. Sometimes, it took up to three drops of the blade to finally wrench off someone's head…all of this done while the charged was fully conscious."

Mr. Binns looked around impressively. Despite the graphic imagery however, he found the majority of the class was slipping into comas from which there may have been no point of return, nursing pools of drool behind propped up textbooks or playing games on smartphones that cost more than his monthly mortgage. The only students who still seemed to be conscious were Katie Bell, frantically studying for a Chemistry quiz behind the poor guise of a history binder, and Hermione Granger, her shrewd eyes fixated to the glowing screen at the front of the otherwise dark classroom. She looked alert, but the notebook on her desk was as blank as Pansy Parkinson's distant stare.

He sighed and turned back to the board. Eight years of Harvard and a master's degree in Political Sciences didn't deserve this.

"This may debatably be called the tip of the iceberg that started the French Revolution." Binns tapped the touchscreen board, switching to the next slide of the presentation. As well as an emotionless monotone, he was widely known for his twenty-three year old, picture-less Powerpoints. _Endless _Powerpoints.

"Thus, the reign of terror began." He scratched his shadowed jaw, pausing reflectively. "Thousands of people were executed, mostly by Guillotine, and later on through other methods, such as rounding up large groups of people, tying them together with ropes, and pushing them off the edge of a cliff to their watery deaths. This was fatal to France's population and already depleted economy, pushing the country into an even deeper depression."

"And…" He stared around, gaging the unresponsive atmosphere. "This will be on the test tomorrow."

Instantly, the glazed students slapped themselves into a semblance of vigilance, scrounging through book bags for pens and asking each other to borrow loose leaf. In the back row, Seamus Finnigan – who had been facedown and imitating a thunderstorm a second ago – shot straight up in his seat and exclaimed "Wagah!"

Binns raised a brow. "What was that, Mr. Finnigan?"

The back row sniggered. Seamus went red in the face, muttering, "Er, nothing. Weird dream. Sorry."

The history teacher nodded, well accustomed to his class being used as a buffer between hallway time and lunch. Striding to the front door, he unceremoniously flipped on the lights, flooding the classroom with fluorescent brilliance. Students straightened, fixing various hairstyles and blinking around with blurry wonder.

"Are there any questions anyone would like me to answer before the test?" he asked loudly. "Anything that needs clearing up?" Except for the sound of backpacks hastily being packed and zipped in preparation for the bell, there was the expected void of silence. That is, until…

"Mr. Binns?"

Binns, having just sat down on his messy desk and flipped open the daily crossword puzzle, jumped in surprise. As his eyes fell on the front row and the somewhat new student with explosive hair staring back at him expectantly, he suddenly remembered what period it was.

"Er, yes?" He cleared his throat, shaking off the metaphorical cobwebs, and took a discreet peek at the attendance sheet, folded in half and wedged underneath his coffee mug. "You have a question…Hermione?"

"Not a question exactly," she replied, with an intellectual gusto that seemed to belong in Congress or some other high place of legislation, not a college prep school. "I just wanted to point out that the execution of the French monarchy wasn't really the beginning of the revolution. It started before that, didn't it? In 1786 at the Storming of the Bastilles, when a mob of the lower class took over the Bastilles prison and freed the convicts. That's what really started it."

"Well." He scratched his feeble goatee in consideration, which had been reluctantly growing for the past two months much to the displeasure of his wife. "I did say it was _debatably _the start of the revolution, but yes, I see your point. Where did you learn that?"

"I studied romanticism. And it was in _A Tale of Two Cities."_

"Wow." He stared at her critically. _Dickens from a Hogwarts brat… now there's a surprise. _ "How come? Was it a summer assignment from your old school?"

"No, I just did it for…uh…er…because…" Hermione stopped, all at once realizing the entire class was significantly more awake and staring at her. Also, she realized how incredibly lame she would sound if she finished that sentence the way she'd been planning to.

_Great, _she thought sarcastically._ I was a first-class geek at my old loser school, now I get to be a social leper at the privileged one. I might as well get a hobbit hole and start introducing myself as Bilbo Baggins, all-time introvert and advocate of the education system. _And thanks to her inner monologue, she'd forgotten what Mr. Binns said.

Awesome.

"You did it because…?" he trailed. "Because you have an interest in history?" His normally emotionless face brightened, probably at the possibility of an in-the-closet history buff, or a fellow _Lord of the Rings _fan who could attend Comic Con with him. Hermione could sense her barely detectable social status shriveling further.

"No, it's not that- I was just-" The bell cut her off, and Hermione wasn't sure if she was thankful for or stymied by the interruption. In any case, everybody forgot about her again in the frantic rush for the door.

"Hallelujah," Katie Bell muttered from next to her, getting up to join ranks with Cho Chang and another girl from the crew team. Both girls were waiting outside in the hallway, smelling strongly of CHANEL No.5 and the Hudson River. The girls at Hermione's old school, Hufflepuff High, always smelled like the Abercrombie & Fitch store – or weed smothered by strawberry perfume, on top of the Abercrombie.

_At least the potheads knew I existed, _she thought, feeling sullen all of a sudden as she grabbed her things. She picked up her messenger bag and waved goodbye to scruffy Mr. Binns, moving into the crowded hall. A bunch of rich, pretentious teenagers didn't matter to her, she told herself. All that mattered was studying hard, winning the full scholarship for Duke University, and moving out of New wouldn't even remember high school when all was said and done – no matter how fantastic the Hogwarts architecture might be.

Or how endless school felt right now.

Suddenly, two guys that had each other in chokeholds burst out of a Chemistry classroom, careening straight through the conveyor belt of students like a conjoined twin rhinoceros. Before she could be smashed into, Hermione leaped back, but a nearby freshman girl with headphones on wasn't so lucky, getting pinned and hurled directly into the wall. The girl screeched as her books flew everywhere – a rain of study notes, pristine binders, and review sheets let loose in the air like confetti in Times Square on New Year's – and the boys broke apart, apologizing through obnoxious laughter as they helped her pick up the mess and stumbled off. Hermione's interest piqued when one of them turned around, revealing his face.

It was freckled, grinning, and…and sheer adorable. Ron Weasley.

Cue cardiac arrest.

Doing her best to be discreet (which was no difficult feat when you're five inches taller than a hobbit and essentially invisible anyway), Hermione easily caught up to the two, falling into step behind the boys and pretending to fumble with the strap of her messenger bag.

"I can't believe he failed my essay," Harry Potter was grumbling when she tuned in. Harry was the school's prized star soccer player and a jock on the higher end of the totem pole at Hogwarts, regionally known for its undefeatable sports record and a famous tendency to produce graduates eventually seen on national television and college sports channels. Because Hogwarts also had a student body limit of one-hundred and eighty, Hermione knew Harry and Ron were best friends.

"I mean, Snape gave me a _negative one. _How is that even possible?" he said incredulously. "I worked on that idiotic paper all Sunday."

"I finished it at 3AM the morning we turned it in and I got a D," Ron inputted unhelpfully. He was a goalie on the team – and admittedly, not the most…_adept_…player Hogwarts had ever seen. Hermione wasn't well-versed in the art of soccer, but she did have eyes. "Maybe he just hates you, man."

"I know he does," Harry said, narrowing his eyes. "All because I accidentally kicked him in the head with the ball at try-outs last year."

"Right. Accidentally."

"I was _nervous – _and the sun was in my eyes!"

"Bullshit."

When they reached the dining room, Harry and Ron headed to the sitting area, and Hermione walked to the serving stations. The Hogwarts dining room, less a cafeteria and more of a Russian czar's banquet, was more familiarly called the Great Hall. She didn't think she would ever get used to this level of extravagance at a high school, although she'd been going to Hogwarts for a solid two months now.

The vast hall was schemed in elegant mahogany wood, dark floors paneled and polished to a tee, and rustic round tables each placed next to a framed flag representing every nationality Hogwarts had ever welcomed from its students (or, Hermione suspected, it was actually a strategized ploy to appear cultured and worldly, and to cover up the racism scandal claiming newspaper headlines all over _Elite Schools Uncovered_ ten years ago).

Half of the grand room was a procession of buffet tables and hot food stations, lavishly decorated with medieval candle chandeliers spanning the domed ceiling like clawed stars, as white light poured in from the arched window cut-outs looking down on the rest of campus. An unlit candelabra or regal flower arrangement never present long enough to wilt centered every table, adding the scent of wax and floral fumes to mix with a succulent gourmet aroma. Perhaps most fantastically of all, the Great Hall provided a kitchenette, where cooks would make whatever you wanted if you only said the word.

A manicured red brick trail was visible through the tiled archway leading outside. Hermione knew from getting lost on her way to Economics one day that the trail led to the abandoned Hogwarts courtyard, a small garden allowed to grow wild because it had been forgotten, with a rusted copper fountain in the center and an unfriendly willow tree that had strangely excellent WiFi access. It was her favorite part of Hogwarts.

She slipped into line for the hot soup station, pushing a few unruly locks of curly hair out of her eyes to see. She was extra ravenous today; she'd slept through her alarm clock and almost missed the G-train again, therefore forced to skip breakfast. The omelets she normally ate – prepared by the Hogwarts expert team of certified chefs – were downright drool-worthy, and sorely missed during first period AP French.

Luckily, partial scholarship covered a meal plan.

If it wasn't for the scholarship, Hermione wouldn't be here at all. As if getting a soaring PSAT score, straight As, sixty hours of community service, and writing a dazzling application essay weren't enough, she'd had to impersonate her mother through emails to get in to Hogwarts, too. In fact, most of the Hogwarts application process _had_ been inventing excuses for Mom. Countless times, she'd explained why her mother could never attend the open house or her student interview, fabricating an inflexible schedule that allowed no time to come to the campus walkthrough for an orientation or meet the Financial Aids Director firsthand. Hermione had pretended to be her mother for four months, a sophisticated woman but fatally ill with a highly-contagious virus contracted from a bad hamburger on Fifth Ave, and strictly on bed rest.

Part of her still didn't believe the outrageous plan had actually _worked. _

When she'd finally been accepted into Hogwarts Institute for Gifted Children – the number one, most exclusive college prep school in New York State, which only offered two sole scholarships per year – her victory was kept secret. After all, as far as Mom was concerned, she was still a full-time student at Hufflepuff High in downtown Queens. As far as Hermione was concerned, that was all her mother would ever need to know.

Hermione walked through the Great Hall, scanning tables filled with loud, devil-may-care teenagers and elaborate flower bouquets for a seat. Every wing of Hogwarts possessed some sort of special nickname, either named in honor of a generous benefactor, or endearingly titled after an event throughout Hogwarts' long, enigmatic history.

Hogwarts Institute had been built in 1831 by four innovators emigrated from the obscurest corners of Europe, all deeply religious in one form or another, and originally founding Hogwarts as a Roman Catholic boarding school for boys. This explained much of the school's antiquated taste, a biased emphasis on Catholic morals, and the high number of volunteer groups. Another fact about the prep school worth nothing was that its kids typically fit into about three castes – none of which included Hermione, to her extreme relief.

Hogwarts boys drove Bentleys and spent their summers building schools for kids in Guam or tanning on catamarans in the Caribbean – or both. They came back in the fall with bronze skin and ridiculous-looking boat shoes, hitting up clubs in Manhattan that would overlook their clearly fake IDs on the weekends, and paying out of the mouth for drugs after school. Hogwarts girls, however, were inherently different. School might be an episode of _America's Next Top Model _considering the time and effort put into appearances, sport captains were considered goddesses and bitingly competitive, and whoring equaled victory if your boyfriend's inheritance topped the president's income.

Off to the right of the bedlam sat a table reserved for Hogwarts' finest: namely, the jocks groomed to be one-day senators, and their snub girlfriends, who only had to buy their future college a new library to be enrolled there.

This is what Hermione knew about them.

Ron Weasley and Harry Potter, as mentioned before, worshipped soccer like it was a religion and they were the priests. Lavender Brown, an heiress of some national airline company, showed endless miles of her bronzed skin rain or shine, and happened to be Ron's merry girlfriend. Most importantly, she had a brain the size of a chocolate chip – and boobs the exact opposite circumference.

The guy with blonde hair so light it looked like he'd bleached it with Clorox, Draco Malfoy, was the over-indulged son of world famous fashion designer _Narcissa_. Pansy Parkinson, a cheerleader and frequent winner for the track team, was often seen in the Bahamas during Christmas break or smashing face with Draco in shadowy corridors. Blaise Zabini's family went years back in stock marketing on Wall Street. Cho Chang, the gorgeous Chinese transfer student, flew out to model in Taiwan on weekends; her best friend Ginny Weasley (Harry's girlfriend) was infamously known for her jealousy streak, faithful attendance to international fashion shows in Paris and Milan, and a wicked spike in volleyball.

Seamus Finnigan's father owned a famous beer manufacturing company in Ireland, and Angelina Johnson had been dating Ron's older brother Fred for three years solid; Fred had never attended Hogwarts, but he ran a multi-billion dollar gag show in Hollywood, along with his twin brother George. Finally, there was Gabrielle Delacour, a foreign exchange student from France with an accent thicker than an Oxford Dictionary, and a personality just as thrilling.

Hermione dragged her eyes away from Beverly Hills Arcadia, sitting down to eat lunch with her usual entourage – which is to say, whoever happened to sit at the same table as her. Usually, that was the two girls from Greece who never spoke a drop of English outside of class, loner Neville Longbottom who never spoke at all, and an eccentric girl with white-blue hair and glittery eye makeup that always talked to him incessantly… despite the fact he never talked back.

Hermione was vaguely sure the girl's name was Linda. Wait, no, it was something unusual, wasn't it? Foreign maybe? Moon-related? _Luna. _Right – Luna something. She was the editor for the school magazine, the Quibbler, and her father was the CEO of the Daily Gazette.

Once she'd finished, Hermione left her tray on the washing rack and slipped away to the abandoned courtyard. Hogwarts campus was enormous: twelve city blocks on the outskirts of Brooklyn with sprawling manicured fields mowed every morning by the maintenance crew, a pool building for the swim team, two-floor gym, the Rowan Ravenclaw Library, a theater hall, school store, and several hangout rooms complete with fireplaces, geometrically-shaped furniture, iPads, and customized candy bars.

Neo-Gothic touches lurked in every aspect of the grounds, in the sandstone brick buildings and pointed spires, the fountains sculpted by fly-in artists, curving archways wreathed with intricate carvings of saints and scripture, and fearsome gargoyles standing guard on the edge of the turret roofs. Every detail came together to render the school into a powerful castle, a French Gothic cathedral transported to the 21st century from lost times.

And it made her feel like a sham.

Beauty and money spilled out of the chandeliers and hand-carved molding like cockroaches in July, taunting her, checking her jeans for holes in the middle of class, filling her with hot shame for the one bedroom basement apartment she'd been holed up in with Mom for the past ten years. No one knew she was a scholarship student, she reminded herself fiercely every time they spoke, every time they glanced at her – but still a cemented itch slithered down her spine as she walked through the front gates of Hogwarts in the morning. It stared in the stone eyes of the gargoyles following her to class, never letting her forget for a second that she didn't truly belong. She would never belong.

She was nothing like a Hogwarts kid.

She had no plans on becoming one of them.

* * *

It was 3:30 PM and Gryffindor had an appointment in fifteen minutes.

After an hour-long ride on the subway, Hermione finally arrived in Queens. She half-walked, half-jogged to the Three Tithes, ducking around pedestrians on the sidewalk and dodging speeding cars on crosswalks. The barista inside the cybercafé, Marietta Edgecombe, was from Hermione's old school and worked part-time. She put in an order for a strawberry mango smoothie and waved her ahead as soon as she saw her burst inside. Hermione paid and put the change in the tip jar, swiping her drink off the counter as she headed to the back.

Ten minutes later, she was sitting cross-legged at her usual table in the corner, next to a magazine rack and the faded print of Elvis Presley's smoldering bedroom eyes. There was a mustard stain on his teeth – or at least, there was a possibility it was mustard. A glance at the laptop screen showed Neanderthal had made good on his word and transacted the rest of his payment to her account this morning. All of Gryffindor's affairs were in order.

Bored, Hermione flurried her fingertips across the keyboard, and Ron Weasley's face soon came up on the social feed. Almost instantly, a nervous flutter she thought might be what heartburn felt like set off somewhere near her kidneys, just as it did every time she saw Ron at school. She'd had a crush on him since first semester started in September, a crush largely attributed to his freckles. (She had a very secret, very real freckle fetish, and Ron Weasley had about a billion of them.)

She spent a moment imagining scenarios in which Ron's girlfriend Lavender ended up dumped and heartbroken, and Ron kept Hermione after class to kiss her with the insatiable passion he'd been holding back for months, a passion that would put fictional vampires to shame.

But what would she say in a message to him?

"Excuse me?"

With a spasmodic jerk, Hermione threw herself over her laptop and clicked _Alt F4 _so fast she nearly gave herself carpal tunnel in one hand. Ron Weasley's face vanished and she looked up, cheeks burning, to see Harry Potter smiling at her brilliantly. She frowned back and averted her attention to the laptop screen once more. Boys who smiled for no reason except to smile, were decidedly best dealt with by not being dealt with at all.

_Wait_.

Hermione looked up again and blinked a few times, testing the reliance of her eyesight, but the beaming prep boy apparition didn't disappear. _Strange, _she mused, _they usually go away by now…_

"I'm Harry," Harry said needlessly, kilowatt smile faltering a touch at her remoteness. He was very sweaty for someone who was smiling so forcefully, and panting like a St. Bernard at that. Did he run here? Why? What was he doing here at all? Didn't he have a collector's car auction or some Hollywood film premiere to go to? Hermione thought incredulously.

Seeming to find her gawking stare a touch unenjoyable, Harry visibly tried to tap down the breathlessness, shoving one hand through his wet black hair and somewhat subtly wiping it off on his shorts. He was wearing knee socks underneath them and a plaid t-shirt, hastily shoved on over his bedraggled long sleeve. Hermione stifled a grimace. _And I thought I had a bad fashion sense_.

"Hi," she finally said back, not without caution.

Harry – who turned out to be very fidgety when sweaty, or fidgety in general – stuck his hands in the pockets of his shorts, rocking back and forth on his Nikes. Hermione wondered how she'd never seen him standing there before, when it was all but impossible _not _to see him now. "Sorry," he said, for no apparent reason other than to say it. "I'm, uh, here waiting for someone. Do you mind if I sit with you until they show up?" He waved behind them vaguely, at the full café. "Everywhere else is taken."

Was it? She hadn't noticed, too preoccupied by the unfeasible fact a Hogwarts kid was standing in the Three Tithes like it was the Palace, talkingto her about a subject other than next week's test or the answers on her homework_. _It seemed unjust at that moment, that Hermione shouldn't have a camera to capture this gloriously bizarre moment with.

"Uh no. Go ahead," she said, when she realized she'd waited too long to answer. Harry started to sit, stopping halfway to quickly look at her. "Are you sure? Because I could go somewhere else if I'm bothering you-"

A snort erupted out of Hermione, she rolled her eyes. "_Pft_, no. Not at all. I just- I was surprised. I don't mind, whatever." _Shut up now, Hermione, you're blabbering. You're blabbering! _She gestured at the empty seat, as if he couldn't see it with his own eyes – he wore glasses, for God's sake – and tried to appear as if a contestable discussion was not taking place in her head.

"What the…" Harry breathed a minute later, eyebrows hitching up to his hairline as he stared over her shoulder at her laptop. At first, Hermione started to swell up – true, her computer model left much to be desired, but it wasn't _that _bad – before it dawned on her that when she closed the Internet window earlier, she had accidentally left a document of code up for a different customer – crazymofo8767 – for the world to see. She moved to close it, but Harry was already leaning in for a closer look. _Oh great. _

"What isthat?" he asked, perplexed.

"Er…Sudoku?"

"That doesn't look like Sudoku."

"It's an advanced version. Gold members only."

Harry gave her a significant look and Hermione shrugged. According to her, she could not be blamed for being born with a sarcasm motor, especially one that worked double time outside of school hours. No one got to choose their genetics. "Seriously," he said, "what is it?"

"Just some programming stuff," she muttered. "Nothing important." She exited out to prove it – and get him to back off. Harry must have gotten the hint from the surly look on her face, pulling back hastily.

Their next silence lasted at least ten minutes, both of them uncomfortably staring in opposite directions. She pretended to take an interest in an Easter edition cooking magazine called Delicacies Weekly, curiously smelling a Dior fragrance ad. She sniffed a perfume sample too hard and pulled back, coughing when a violent throat tickle exploded on her uvula. Quickly, she grabbed for her smoothie, only to find it empty. Perfect.

Her eyes started to water with the effort of diffusing her gag reflex.

Harry straightened. "So Hayley-"

"Hermione," she corrected, sounding like a run-over toad.

"Oh geez, sorry, Hermione." He smiled awkwardly. "I ask you about homework all the time and I don't even have your name right. …Er, this is your first year at Hogwarts, right?"

She nodded, still choking.

"It's a, uh, nice name," he added, clearly trying to amend his fluke. "Interesting."

It was actually Shakespeare. Mom used to be a big fan, back when she remembered how to read anything that wasn't on TV Guide. But all Hermione said – well, croaked – was, "Thanks."

Silence #2 ensued. Harry bounced his legs back and forth, scratched the nape of his neck, and bent forward to loosely clasp his hands between his knees in what seemed to be a physical effort to stop fidgeting – all within the span of two minutes. Hermione tried not to stare. "Do you know what time it is?" he said suddenly, snapping his head up fast enough to make her jump.

"Yeah, uh, give me a second." She tapped a letter on her keyboard and the screensaver of bubbles vanished, replaced by the desktop. A flat-faced Kneazle glared at them darkly from the screen and Hermione felt a tiny chink of fondness at the photo of her manic aggressive cat, Crookshanks. "It's 4:20," she reported.

_Weird, _she thought, pursing her lips, _silverstag97 was supposed to be here over thirty minutes ago._ Maybe she'd been spammed, it wouldn't be the first time it had happened – and it was no less annoying now than it had been then.

Harry also seemed aggrieved by this news, strangely enough – which got Hermione feeling very suspicious. "I've been here for over a half-hour waiting for this computer geek guy to show up and he's still not here," he said, scowling and rubbing both sides of his face with his palms like an errant cat. "Maybe I should just take off." This last part was said more to himself, than to Hermione.

She looked at Harry, hard. "What guy?"

"_Gryffindor_ or something, it's a username," he said absently, standing up. "Sorry, Mione-" Past her horror, Hermione was confounded by Harry's terrible abbreviation of her name. "I've gotta go. See you at school."

He was walking away – probably never to speak to her outside of Hogwarts' premises again, immediately eliminating any chances of her being invited to group hangouts where Ron might happen to conveniently be, and inexplicably fall in love with her – when she impulsively shouted "_Wait!"_

Harry turned around, surprised. "What?"

She stalled, opening and closing her mouth pointlessly. _I have no idea what I'm doing, _she thought, but in her mind she saw an image of the kitchen counter from this morning, cluttered with unopened envelopes of bills and debts on different bills and disconnection notices, reminding her _why _she was here at the Three Tithes at 3:45PM sharp – although it didn't help the bright red complexion that had come over her face with a vengeance.

She couldn't believe she was doing this.

"You're – um – silverstag97 with the grade change request, right?" she gritted out.

Harry's mouth parted and he stared at her through those too big, oddly fitting glasses of his for a nonplussed minute, thick eyebrows working. "You're the guy?" he finally said, confused. "Gryffindor?"

"Yes. And I'm a she. Obviously." Shifting into business mode, she straightened and added, "Did you bring your computer?"

"I…um…" He shook his head, as if he could physically dispel his bemusement. "I mean, no, it's at my house. It's a desktop."

"Oh." Hermione frowned. She didn't usually like to do traceable work through her own equipment, especially if it was something as tricky as what Harry was asking for – but he _was _a Hogwarts boy, which meant money was no object for him.

_Federal prison, here I come, _she told herself, not altogether sarcastically.

Cracking her knuckles, – Harry winced at the noise, which gave her a vindictive sort of satisfaction and made her want to do it again – Hermione waved him back over and opened the web browser on her laptop. "Ok, first of all, I want you to know I strongly disapprove of this," she began, as she always did when tampering with student's grades – whether to try to coax said student onto an ethically better path, or to abate her own conscience was a topic up for discussion. "Secondly, this costs about four hundred dollars," she continued. "Can you pay?"

Harry nodded and Hermione waited for the _something_ _else_. The _of course _or _well, duh. _Perhaps even a pretentious snortthat was so typical of Hogwarts kids. When Harry did neither except stare at her patiently, she blinked and turned back to the screen. "Right. Do you want to change a whole grade average, or a grade for a specific class or something?"

"I was thinking along the lines of something smaller," he said, pointing at the online copy of his interim report. His finger landed on a class Hermione had already suspected he would choose. "Can you change one assignment? For Chem?" he inquired.

Now Hermione wanted to say _well, duh. _She bit her tongue before it could come out. "Show me which assignment and what grade you want," she replied simply.

After about twenty minutes, Hermione was four hundred dollars richer and Harry had a B minus on his intermolecular bonds essay. (Hogwarts, it should be noted, ought to look into investing in a better security network.) She zipped the cash into her Hello Kitty wallet, ignoring Harry's astonished look, and started to pack up.

"You're going?" Harry asked, watching Hermione hitch a bulging messenger bag onto her slight shoulder. She looked at him with those uncannily sharp brown eyes of hers, eyebrow furrowing in puzzlement, but he had to look away after a moment. Holding her gaze reminded him of trying to stare down the sun or a mean dog – it was impossible to do without getting yourself injured.

"Yeah, I mean-" She frowned, planting one hand on a hip. "-what else is there to stay for? Did you want me to do something else?"

"No, I… never mind." He shrugged. "I'll just walk out with you, I have to get going too anyway." Harry stood up, towering over her easily. He wasn't very tall, but Hermione was pretty short, even with the few bonus inches of her unusually big hair. His scrappy lankiness – which gave the impression Harry was part-toothpick – and spike-soled sneakers also boosted his height. _Unfair, _Hermione mentally bristled, following his tall, skinny form through the crowded café to the exit.

Rain was beginning to come down in fleeting, quicksilver bullets outside. Hermione started to go, but Harry Potter didn't seem to think their meeting was over yet. Clamping down a twinge of irritation when he spoke up, she slowly turned back around, eyes widened expectantly.

"Do you do this all the time?" Harry asked, waving a hand toward the Three Tithes to indicate whatever he meant by _this_. "Like every day?"

"It's an on and off thing," she said reluctantly. "For…fun." Inside, Hermione cringed at her poor choice of words, wishing she could take them back. First, she studied history units during the summer for fun, and now she committed cybercrime for mere amusement. Boy, she sure was turning out to be a real gem. No wonder she had so many boyfriends!

"But it's a job, too," Harry pointed out, frowning at her. "Isn't it? I saw your profile online, you seem to be pretty well-known."

"I also apparently seem to be male and nerdy," she said pointedly. Harry flushed. Before he could pry into her business anymore, she cycled back three steps and announced, "Well, I have to go, er, Harry. It's raining." Barely. "And I have homework." A lie, she did all of it during class. "So…bye." _Hopefully_.

Harry nodded, lifting his hand in a wave. "See you around."

_No, you won't. _But Hermione only smiled stiffly, turned around, and hurried away.

* * *

The rain storm was fast and furious by the time Hermione reached downtown. Climbing up the subway station exit to ground level, she found the streets outside had become glittering black rivers, streaming with runoff and dotted by pruned trash bags on the block corners. She lifted the hood of her hoodie up and held her messenger bag close, darting into a construction tunnel to avoid the rain.

The menacing groans of thunder were ignored by Hermione as she walked home, because maybe the thunder was only the sound of a subway rushing to another stop, its booming procession echoing through the tunnels like a war chant, pouring out of the vents in potholes and creeping into the street to confuse everyone. Or maybe because for every boom of thunder, there are three strikes of lightning we haven't even seen yet.

Storms were a peculiar brand of uncertainty.

Fifteen blocks later, an apartment building with ivy green railings surfaced in the distance, marked number _9_ in a seamless row of unremarkable brownstones. As Hermione walked, she imagined spring, where pollen showered the city in a fine white dance, and the tulips at Central Park grew in like bean poles. Fumbling with her keys, she undid the numerous locks to the apartment, shouldering the rusted door until it caved and let her in. The scent of stale cigarettes and flat coffee divulged her senses, permanent scents leaked in by the heating ducts connected to the landlord's flat upstairs.

_Home sweet home_, the old straw welcome matt read a small sigh, Hermione switched on the hallway light and kicked off her Converses – one flew off and landed on an orange heap of frizz that had come to greet her, which flailed back into a half-open shoe closet with a wounded screech.

"Oh shoot, Crookshanks! I'm sorry," Hermione gasped, crouching down and fretting over her Kneazle with apologetic hands. Crookshanks, a manic aggressive stray that had wandered his way to their household when she was in middle school, bit her finger hard enough to draw blood before scampering off like a thief. "_Ouch!_ Yeesh, I said I was sorry, you oversensitive banshee-"

But Crookshanks had already left, probably gone under Hermione's bed to lay some revenge cat crap on her textbooks. Hopefully, the school-owned volumes would survive his wrath.

Hermione sighed and wrung out her hair with her good hand, squeezing water out of the frizzy strands and wiping her socks on the rainbow striped throw rug she'd picked up at an Indian shop going out of business last year. It had sense taken residence in the tiny entrance hall. "I'm home," she yelled. "Do we have any band-aids?"

When no one answered, she went into the living room, twelve square feet of a lumpy couch, tiny dining room set (really just fold-up tables), and an old-fashioned TV with huge bug antennas. The freezing hardwood floor groaned under her as she walked in, dipping and rising unevenly in places the soles of her feet had memorized, the gleaming wood polish long worn away by past tenants.

She moved past Mom, passed out on the couch while some reality show played, and dropped the grocery bags she'd grabbed at a bodega three blocks back on the kitchen floor. A band-aid in the overflowing junk drawer was scrounged up, and she started to put away the food, willing herself not to get annoyed about the mess the apartment was in. _Even if it _was_ spotless when I left this morning, _she thought irritably.

"What do you want for dinner?" she called out, shuffling through the forlorn cabinet shelves loudly enough to rouse her mother from Dream Land. "Pasta or mac and cheese?"

No response. Slyly, Hermione pulled a pot out of a cabinet and dropped it on the floor with an ear-splitting _BANG _of metal and linoleum_. _The sound of Mom grudgingly returning to consciousness was accompanied by a curse when she couldn't find the remote control.

"Mom-"

"I'm not hu-huuungry," Mom said through a mighty yawn, giving up on her search for the remote and falling back on the couch with a huff. "I just want-"

"You have to eat something," Hermione interrupted, re-entering the living room and coming to a halt in front of the TV set. Heat radiated off of it, warming her back – it had clearly been on all day, and since it was nearly thirty years old and shitty, that meant the electricity bill would be sky-high by the end of the month.

Mom avoided her eyes, fidgeting with the crocheted blanket thrown around her. She was wearing the same clothes as yesterday, size zero but vast and revealing on her gaunt frame, which was thin as a spindle's needle and riddled with bruises and thin scars. Looking at her mother was similar to staring at a dug-up skeleton: dirty, hollow-eyed, and wasted.

But that was nothing new. Hermione, whose keen eyes missed not even the tiniest change, was interested in seeing her mother's gaze. "Aren't you hungry?" she asked cajolingly.

Stubbornly, Mom didn't answer.

She scowled. "Fine, pretend you can't hear me. I'll make us the pasta."

"Have a ball," Mom said sarcastically, rolling her eyes. Her pupils, Hermione instantly noticed, were the size of pencil points. _Bingo. _

Mom seemed to realize what she did a second too late, cursing again – this time, at Hermione. She started to make an angry retort when the doorbell suddenly rang and interrupted them.

She threw up her arms, exasperated. "You invited Mundungus here tonight? I thought you weren't going to bring him around on school nights."

"I didn't talk to Mundy today," Mom said defensively. Hermione stared at her hard – she could always tell when someone was lying – but Mom didn't exhibit any tells. Her mother peered at the front hallway over the back of the couch, lifting her head so slowly her skull could have weighed three hundred pounds. If the pupils were the first sign something about her was off, her mother's exhaustion was a sure confirmation that she'd been high. But the hyperactive bliss had gone by now, leaving a lethargic sloth behind – maybe Mundungus and his friends stopped by when she was at school.

_No wonder this place is a mess, _she thought furiously, kicking aside an empty beer can that had been poorly hidden under the DVD stand.

"Who's at the…the door?" Mom asked, through another gaping yawn.

The doorbell rang again, insistently. Hermione broke her stance with an aggravated growl. "I'll go look," she grumbled, stomping off. Mom fished the remote out from between one of the couch cushions and changed the channel behind her.

At the door, Hermione stood on tip toe and stuck her face against the eyehole, hovering her hand over the chain lock. Her heart instantly turned into a ball of lead at what she found there, however.

_Oh. My. God. _

There were cops. _At her house. _

Oh God. "Oh shoot, oh shoot, oh shoot, oh _shoot_," she whispered furiously, head whipping back and forth between her mother's placid form and the door. What were the police doing here? What did her Mom do? Did they know about the disability checks, the heroin? Or did Mom's loser boyfriend get busted for selling drugs again, and blame them for it this time?

Worse. Did they know about _Gryffindor?_

She really didn't need this.

Hermione took a deep breath, decided to shove all the blame onto Mundungus if they were here to search for drugs, and got to work on unlocking the door. With her hands trembling uncontrollably, it took thirty seconds longer than it should have, but finally she opened it.

"Hi, um-" She swallowed nervously under the weight of three policemen's stares on her, trying to seem composed and unsuspicious. "May I help you?"

"That depends." The one who spoke had the head of a boiled egg, shaved and strangely spongy-looking. He pointed sharply at her. "Are you Hermione Granger?" he demanded.

_No. In fact, I've never heard of that name in my life. Excuse me while I escape to Canada. _

Hermione stared at each of the officers evenly: one African American woman with brown eyes and close-shaved platinum blond hair on the right, an overweight man giving her dirty looks to the left, and then the sponge man between them. There was no point denying it. "Yes."

"Would you come with us, sweetheart?" the woman said, holding up an impressive-looking badge for her to see. _As if the uniform didn't make the message clear enough._ "There's someone at the station who would like to ask you some questions." At that, Hermione's heart pounded so hard she was sure they could see it lurching against the Taco Bell logo on her massive hoodie.

"Am…" Her voice faltered. She started again. "Am I in trouble?"

The policemen all exchanged a meaningful look, which she did not miss, and Hermione had to fight not to scowl. How old did they think she was, twelve? More aggressively than she meant it to be, she snapped, "Well, what is it?"

_There goes the sarcasm motor. _Instantly, any possible sympathy in the air vanished. The woman faced Hermione, squaring her shoulders and speaking in a voice suddenly carved not out of lollipops and roses, but grit and steel. "Miss Granger, you are hereby arrested under charges for piracy," she informed her sternly, revealing a pair of handcuffs and advancing. Hermione's eyes widened. "Come with us now, we're taking you to the station."

Hermione stared blankly at the three of them for a minute and when she spoke, her voice was just shy of a mental breakdown. "Okay."

The officers escorted her to the cruiser.

* * *

**AN: WHAT? NO TOM RIDDLE THIS CHAPTER? BUT WHERE IS MY BABBBBYYYY? D'''''':**

**Deep breaths, deep breaths, girls! His sexiness will return. Next chapter. I swear it! **

**Kisses!  
****I****mmortalObsession**


	3. An Alternative

**AN: Lots of theories in the reviews page...but no right answers. *mystery music***

**Muchos thanks for all your support! I love all your reviews (and all of _you_, sweetlings). P.S. Voldyboy is back in this chapter and frustratingly sexy as ever. **

**Yums.**

* * *

The Noble Blacks' numbers weren't terrible – they were complete dog shit.

Voldemort had Malfoy recount the information again, did the calculations, and swore fantastically. Between their partners in Las Vegas, the sum of the loan sharks' collections, their gambling pools, and the lacking drug supply, they had made five percent less than last month's earnings. Less than.

_That does not happen, _he thought numbly, breaking away from the tiny black print on the stack of reports to rub his face.

_Less than._

It was because of the rats, Voldemort speculated, as well as a contribution from Detective Kingsley, who was eating up every word traitorous informants fed him like a starved shark, and throwing his men in the jailhouse faster than Voldemort could replace them. Imprisonment was not the issue here – sentences were short and bail money was virtually nothing to the family – but their untrustworthy members were starting to become…problematic.

How was his enterprise to hold up when all the nails and glue of that enterprise were falling apart? One shift of wind and they were finished; the whole house was about to go tumbling down in a gust of defeat and unearthed skeletons.

_This is exactly how the five families went out, _he thought darkly. The five families were the most famous and feared American Mafia organizations of their time, precious to the mob, and scorned by the CIA and FBI – or at least, they were before an increase of government intelligence and technology made them bite the dust in the late 70s. They still existed in their small, discreet ways, but _La Costra Nostra_ nowhere near its former legendary prominence.

This was precisely why he needed to take command of the Noble Blacks. Now.

_But Cygnus wants to wait until my birthday. _Voldemort briefly wondered if his foster father's cancer was affecting his cerebral cortex yet. It was October, his birthday still more than three months away on December 31st. The Noble Blacks only had to hold out until then, when he could take the reins of the corporation.

And what plans he had for their family.

Voldemort picked the phone back up off the hook and rapped his fist on the glass, calling back Malfoy's attention from where he'd been checking out the rear of some inmate's visiting fiancée. Malfoy was one of the family's oldest and trustworthy capos, he ran a handful of dealers from multiple locations in Queens and the Bronx. Basically, Voldemort told him what he wanted done and Malfoy made sure the button men didn't mess up while doing it – if they did, Voldemort schemed their consequences. Consequences were disastrous…for the ones at fault, at least.

To the public eye, Malfoy was simply Voldemort's attorney.

"Boss," Malfoy greeted. "Any ideas?"

In response, Voldemort gave Malfoy a _What do you think? _look, with more than a hint of superiority and his typical condescension. The perspicacious lieutenant was one of those rare people who could do just as much with their facial expressions as others could do with their mouths – if not more – and he knew it. This talent was in part ascribed to upbringing, but mostly blamed on plain good genes.

With styled black hair the shade of chimney soot, a soft mouth, and piercing eyes like blue lightning, Voldemort's delicately molded features narrowly missed femininity. The result was an inevitable sex appeal, the exact kind of deadly allure a strawberry dart frog used to persuade predators to touch its vividly-colored, poisonous skin. From the confident set of his shoulders to a slow blink of cold, heavy-lashed eyes, the young man could have a prince willing to follow him to the ends of earth and back with nothing but five cents in his pocket, just as easily as he could make hearts pound in sincere fear for their livelihoods.

At that moment, Malfoy was leaning toward the latter.

"We'll need to double the protection payments, firstly," Voldemort said finally, "to make up for some of the loss of our…unsatisfactory earnings." Reclining until the front legs of his chair hitched off the floor, he waited while Malfoy made a note. "Make sure you send in an auditor to see that everyone is paying us what they should be," he went on, "and specifically to check on the super market in Harlem – one of our general store managers is taking more than his fair share and needs reprimanding. Get someone to shake him up and fire the staff. I want all brand-new replacements by tomorrow." Small businesses were good distractors, helping explaining away Cygnus Black's freakishly high income to the federal government every year – and the stores were also excellent for selling innocent black market items, such as pirated DVDs, music, and fake IDs for adolescents.

"Should I send Lestrange down?" Malfoy questioned.

Voldemort thought the possibility over, but ultimately decided it would be an overreaction to use Lestrange to handle the situation – not setting an example. After all, Lestrange was one of their…looser cannons, to put it delicately. The lower-ranked men called her Beezlebub, and it wasn't because she had red horns and a spaded tail – not visible ones, at least.

"Just shake him up," he repeated.

Again Malfoy nodded. "Should I see about setting up new connections with some more lotto partners, or opening new spots downtown-?" He stopped when Voldemort waved him off, not listening but squinting pensively at a guard standing on the perimeter of the room. The eavesdropper noticed, blanched, and didn't only avert his gaze, but turned his entire body in a different direction.

"He looks familiar," Voldemort murmured. Turning back to Malfoy, who was staring perplexedly at the guard, he said, "No more gambling, we're having enough trouble pulling in a sustainable profit as it is. And I don't care about national connections. I told you, we're going to expand our influence outside of the U.S., that's how we're going to do business from now on. The supplier in Cuba, did he agree to my proposal?"

"He wants to meet you in person before agreeing on a price."

He licked the inside of his front teeth, making a single nod. "I'll arrange that. What about the shipment from Thailand?"

Now, Malfoy paled slightly and dropped his eyes. He muttered, "There's been a…situation…with that actually, sir."

"Fucking bandits," Voldemort replied, dropping his chair with an unceremonious _smack! _and jerking forward. Into the phone, he hissed, "You tell them, I'm not paying one _cent_ if they lost our delivery to a couple of goons with guns-"

"No, no, it's not that," Malfoy hastened to say. "They _have _it, but…" He frowned in confusion, which irked Voldemort more. What had the man so tongue-tied? "Haven't you seen the news?" he asked.

"It's seven in the morning, if you haven't noticed, so no," Voldemort said curtly. Early morning parole had just ended, as well as breakfast, and he'd been reading a fantasy novel was what he didn't say. "Why?"

"An earthquake hit Thailand last night in Nonthaburi." _Nonthaburi_. The location of their lead heroin supplier. Voldemort's stomach twisted. "It did huge damage, a 6.8, with a death toll of thousands." Malfoy spread his hands beseechingly. "The closest airports are down for the week, our shipment is stuck there, and the suppliers are nervous because of all the media coverage. Helicopters and newscasters are all over the place down there. There's just too much attention, we need a back-up plan to get the shipment out of the country."

"Where is the shipment now?" he inquired.

"Hidden, for now." Malfoy lowered his voice conspiratorially, not that he needed to – after all, no prison guard was stupid enough to try to listen into one of Voldemort's conversations. "But with all the aerial footage the media is broadcasting, they're worried someone will spot the fields. They want to get rid of the shipment as soon as possible, in case they get searched and are found with it. If we don't get our cargo out soon, they're going to demand more money for hiding it."

Well, 300 keys of heroin _was_ a lot of loot to be caught red-handed with. It was also worth 945,000 thousand American dollars. Approximately.

"And there's one more thing," Malfoy added before he could lose his nerve, discreetly sliding an envelope through the slot in the window. Voldemort picked it up, giving him a questioning cock of one black eyebrow. "It's from your father, he said it's safe to read now," the capo explained before he could ask.

That meant Cygnus. Voldemort blew out a hot breath through his nose, ripped open the envelope, and found his letter inside. Safe it was, indeed, since there were only two words waiting for him. All the message said was,

_Fix this._

Cygnus Black wasn't referring to the Thailand dilemma. He was referring to everything, the entire empire, the crummy income, their traitorous ranks, the fuck-up with being accused of first-degree murder and Voldemort being careless enough to almost be caught in the act. He crumpled the letter in one fist.

"Er, and another thing," Malfoy said tentatively across the line, drawing Voldemort's death glare onto his unfortunate person. He cleared his throat. "You might want to give some thought to setting an example for the others when you come back. After the slip with Wormtail and the rest, there have been some…_doubts_…about your capability."

He raised his brows. "Are you one of these 'doubters'?"

Malfoy's eyes widened. "Of course not!" he sputtered, reddening. "You know I've been with your family for years, I would never even entertain the thought-"

"I know," Voldemort said icily, "that some sneaky little shit has been leaking _my_ information to the police left and right. I know that I don't give a damn what any of my men think, so long as they're doing exactly what I say."

He leaned closer, so that Malfoy was ridiculously grateful for the window dividing them, but simultaneously felt it could be made of steel and Voldemort could still reach his hand through it and throttle him with one flick of his wrist. "I know that if you value your life or your family at all, you'll get out of my sight right now and put an end to this bullshit instead of talking my ear off about it. You know the procedure for rats. _Follow it."_

"Yes, sir," Malfoy said instantly. He hung up the phone so hard the plastic cracked, grabbed his coat without bothering to put it on, and exited the visiting room. Voldemort stared at Cygnus's crumpled message, his temple throbbing. _Fix this. _How? Doing what? With what resources? By what means?

Didn't matter to Cygnus. It was on his head now.

* * *

_Of all the stupid things I could be arrested for, _Hermione thought, staring glossily at the untouched Styrofoam cup of coffee the officers left her over a half-hour ago. She'd had one sip of it too soon and nearly vaporized her taste buds. _I get charged for illegally downloading music. Which everybody does. _Another thought occurred to her, scarier than the last: what would the police do if they knew about Gryffindor?

She really hoped she would never find out.

Hermione had been sitting alone in the interrogation room the officers dumped her inside for forty-five minutes. She knew the police were just trying to play mind games. To leave her alone with her paranoid, fearful thoughts, so that when the interrogator finally did arrive she would just burst into tears and confess everything, from the first mp3 download to the keychain she shop lifted from CVS pharmacy when she was four years old. She knew this, because it was exactly what happened when she was sent to the principal's office in elementary school for kicking some fifth grader who wouldn't let her play on the monkey bars and didn't know what a shower was in the shin during recess. She had never cried so much in under five minutes – and that was just to the main office secretary.

Yep, she was a girl made of steel. Hardcore was her middle name.

She looked out of the window overseeing the department. The enormous office was much bigger than the one in Queens, filled to the brim with blue-suits and skyscraper-high piles of paperwork. Employees manning desks for 911 calls picked up and slammed the receivers fast, tapping away at their keyboards and yammering into their headsets as they worked to save the day. She snorted, whipping her gaze back to the cold coffee.

The interrogator came in.

Hermione straightened, pulling back her shoulders and assessing the new arrival. The man who entered the interrogation room was tall and wore a classy navy blue suit, with wavy silver hair, blue eyes, and a bumpy crescent-shaped scar the size and shape of a nickel under his left eye. It looked like a bullet wound to her.

But, strangest of all, was the golden badge gleaming on the man's lapel and declaring him Chief Inspector.

What was the Chief doing interrogating a high school kid?

Whatever the reason was, when the Chief saw her a knowing gleam lit those surprisingly blue eyes and he clasped his hands behind his back, smiling to reveal large white teeth. The smile relaxed Hermione somewhat, despite what her better instincts said about police. _Thank God, _she thought._ He's not the bad cop._

"Hermione, my dear, it is an absolute pleasure to meet you." The Chief came around, arm outstretched, and they shook hands – she with bewilderment, he with an equally shocking amount of strength in his grip. "I'm sorry I took so long to get here," he began in apology, pulling away to seat himself on the edge of the table. The foldable chair on the other side went unnoticed. "But you know all about New York traffic, I'm sure. It's endless." He winked at her, stunning Hermione. He didn't seem like most old men she knew, who were either excessively grouchy or too outdated to talk to without encountering multiple racial slurs. He was almost even…cool.

Cool_ish_, anyway.

"Now I have a meeting soon, so I can't talk for long," he went on, like a mentor about to quickly give his protégée some important advice, rather than a cop about to ruin her life. Hermione prepared for the blow. "You see, Hermione, I have my hands tied with your case here. I understand that you're only eighteen and that you must be very…_freaked out, _what with being called down to a police station and charged with a serious crime." He paused to give her a stern look. "Piracy."

She nodded, trying to look ashamed. Maybe he would take pity on her if she played up the role of the innocent girl, or turned on the waterworks? _That works for speeding tickets, _she thought then, chagrined, _not prison sentences!_

Suddenly, Hermione was snapped out of her chasing thoughts when the Chief said something that caught her off-guard completely. "This isn't the first time you've been here," he said, folding his hands and levelling a solemn stare at her. "Is it?"

_So the interrogation begins. _Hermione, who had been expecting this, looked the Chief dead in the eye. Avoiding eye contact was a tell for liars, and she took care never to lie – but if in the rare instance that she did, she always took double care never to be caught for it. "Actually, it is," she said coolly.

"Well, perhaps you've never been _here _before_._" He studied her. "But you have been to a police station more than once; the one in Queens, correct? That is where you live, isn't it?"

Wordlessly, she nodded.

"I don't say this to intimidate you, or insinuate that you're responsible for other 'illegitimate pastimes'," he continued, a fond smile twirling the lips under his groomed silver goatee. "I knew your father when he transferred to this department actually, and on his first day, he brought you to work. It was the one time I met you, and I'm not surprised you don't remember me, since you were very young." He held up his hand, just below the height of the table. "You were about yay high, maybe a hair shorter," he said reminiscently.

Hermione wasn't concerned with her childhood shortness, however. Staring at the Chief, she tried to recognize some part of his merry, lined features, but her memories didn't hold a lick of him. "You knew my dad?" she asked.

"Yes, we worked together a few times." He frowned. "Before he passed away, of course."

At the reminder of Dad's death, Hermione stiffened. All at once, she remembered just who she was talking to, and exactly what type of person the Chief was. She'd had a grudge against cops, ever since Dad got shot trying to protect one. "Listen, I don't mean to be rude, but I don't remember you at all, and usually I'm very good with faces," she said, making no effort to strain for civility. "So who are you?"

"Oh, I forgot to introduce myself, didn't I?" The man smiled, chuckling good-naturedly. "I'm Chief Grindelwald." Grindelwald didn't offer a nickname. _He must be foreign, _Hermione thought, although she detected no accent in his speech.

"Well," she said, crossing her arms, and acting much more self-assured than she really felt. "Why are you here interrogating me when you've probably got much bigger things to do than deal with high school girls?"

He blinked. "That's right, I've got a meeting in ten minutes." Grindelwald checked his watch discontentedly, and Hermione saw with surprise that he was wearing a golden Rolex. _Police salary must pay better than it did ten years ago,_ she thought, brows furrowing. "And you have school tomorrow," he added as an afterthought, tugging his sleeve back down when he saw her staring.

"School?" she echoed vacantly. "But aren't you going to…?" _Throw me in the slammer? Bring me to justice? Forcibly take my fingerprints? _She trailed off into silence.

Grindelwald smiled, a decidedly mischievous wink in his eye. He had a wonderful sort of smile, Hermione realized, the kind she imagined F. Scott Fitzergald had in mind when he wrote up Jay Gatsby. "Here is where my proposal comes in," he said smugly.

"Proposal?"

"By law, I have to arrest you," Grindelwald began. She stiffened. "You'll have to appear in court and pay a fine decided by the judge."

"How much could the fine be?"

"Anywhere from five to one-hundred fifty thousand dollars." Hermione blanched. He continued, "Now if you're unable to pay the fine, then you're sentenced to six months of imprisonment at best and three years of imprisonment at absolute worst."

Her jaw having dropped at six months, Hermione's blood started to rush when she heard _three_ _years_. _Three years? How am I supposed to live in a prison for three years? _Plus, there was no way she could pay a fine that massive. What would happen to Mom without her there to pay the bills and remind her to change outfits? What would become of her education? She doubted even a community college would take her in with _that_ ugly black mark on her record. What about her high school diploma? She wouldn't be able to get anything better than a GED. No, she'd probably end up with a desk job, or have to go back to McDonalds to defrost chicken nuggets until she keeled over from the fumes of the deep-fryer in her late sixties.

In less than a terrific thirty seconds, Hermione had seen the scholarship to Hogwarts she worked so hard for and all her dreams of starting a dentistry practice in Venice sail right down the toilet. Her life was _over_.

"Now, now, don't look so down so fast," Grindelwald said hastily, searching around as if there was something in the interrogation room that might stop an 18-year old girl from having a mental breakdown. All he found was the cup of stale coffee, which he sighed helplessly at. "Look, you're a bright girl, aren't you? The top of your class?" he said, taking her hands in his weathered, calloused ones. Hermione nodded, although she was confused how he knew that.

"Well, that's why I've created another option for you-" Grindelwald smiled. "-so all your talents don't have to go wasted."

She blinked, taking back her hands so she could wipe at her face hastily. _The proposal. _"What is it?" she demanded. "What do I have to do?"

Grindelwald, appearing relieved the threat of tears had passed, straightened and folded his hands. "Volunteer work," he said firmly. Hermione was floored.

"That's…that's it?" she said, bewildered.

At her astonishment, Grindelwald laughed. "This isn't the easiest form of volunteering," he informed her, deeply amused. "First of all, you'll need to go to Azkaban Prison. That's a maximum-security correctional facility on Staten Island, and it requires you to spare a few nights out of your week, and three community service hours each day you go. It's not a terribly demanding schedule, so you'll have time to work on your studies as you see fit."

"And what part of it is-" She sought the wording the chief had used. "-'not the easiest'?"

"That would be the inmates probably," he admitted, wincing. He touched his beard in consideration. "They're known to be rowdy, especially around young women… but there is one inmate in particular, who I need you to keep an eye on."

Hermione looked up. "You want me to _spy_ on someone there?"

He chortled sharply. "Oh no, not at all," Grindelwald reassured through his heart laughter, but his pleased smile said _now you're onto something, Hermione! _"I only want you to keep tabs on the inmate – not even that. You see, we're talking about a…_person…_ who is a notorious criminal and, unfortunately, increasingly difficult to keep behind bars. Anything that might help us keep him where he belongs would be highly appreciated by the entire city, and," he added tactfully, "well-compensated for."

_Well-compensated for? _But Hermione didn't ask what he meant by that yet. She said, "Who exactly are we talking about, Grindelwald?" She almost said _Chief_, but it felt wrong in her mouth, like calling a teacher by their first name – it was just too weird, even if she was outside of school.

Grindelwald grew serious. "That's confidential. I can only tell you that information if you agree to my terms."

"Terms? What-?"

"The contract is in my office," he interrupted. "If you would like to consider my proposal, I'll give it to you on your way out." He stood up with a regretful sigh, glancing down at his watch. "Unfortunately, that's about all the time I have to spare tonight, however."

"What? But- I mean-" Hermione stopped, organizing herself and roughly skimming the details in her head. "Isn't this – well – _dangerous_?" she asked.

"It's true, what I'm asking you to do is a little…dangerous," he agreed. He assessed her, not like he was trying to estimate her face value, but as if he already knew it and was impressed enough to put her to the test. "Police work is in your blood, isn't it?" the Chief said, smiling now. "And you care about your future enough to fight for it." The latter was an assumption, but a correct one.

"How long do I have to think about this?" she said, instead of answering.

"You're going to consider it?"

She looked at him dubiously. "Well, duh."

The chief laughed out loud. "I like you," he declared, waggling his finger at her, and reaching over behind him to put a phone call that had been ringing on hold. "You've got this fiery spark thing going on. I wouldn't have seen it at first, but after talking to you for a time… Well, you're more than meets the eye, aren't you?"

"Thanks," Hermione said, frowning. She wasn't sure what else to say to that statement.

"I'll give you a week to consider. Follow me, please, and I'll get you that contract." Grindelwald waved her out, plucking the untouched coffee cup off the table and dropping it in the trash before going after her. Hermione looked around at the blue-suits weaving in and out of the fluorescent-lit hallway, her eyes narrowing infinitesimally, but Grindelwald noticed. He tried his utmost to come across as comforting – the hardened girl looked like she needed an ally.

Placing his hand on her shoulder, he said, "I should also mention that if you work with us, you'll be paid despite the _volunteer _job description. I'll gladly discuss just how much with you at another time."

Hermione nodded, eyes now not on the officers, but on his hand. He removed it awkwardly. "I'll keep that in mind," she said.

* * *

"Hermione, is that you?"

"Yeah, it's me," Hermione called back, dropping her messenger bag and shucking off her blue Converses. She carried a bag of cat litter and tuna cans inside, skirting past Mom where she sat watching teenage reality shows on TV and disintegrating into the couch cushions. Mom grunted in reply. Hermione half-wished that for once, she would say _how was your day? _or _do you need help with that? _But she'd learned a long time ago to let go of stupid fantasies.

"What's that?" Mom said, seeing the PETCO bag. Her sardonic smile was brittle. "More stuff for that Satan cat?"

"Crookshanks is not Satan's cat," Hermione growled. "He's mine."

Mom barked out a laugh, choking on it halfway through and sounding like a chain-smoker. Hermione rolled her eyes, mouthing _exactly _the same time Mom triumphantly exclaimed "Exactly!" It was a joke her mother told a thousand times, but she never seemed to remember that, so Hermione never failed to humor her.

However, Mom tired quickly of laughing and slumped back into the mold of herself she'd created in the couch. "Did you get any people food?" she said, changing the channel from Animal Planet to a wrestling show to two white women showing off the benefits of a chrome toaster oven. It didn't matter what was on though, Hermione knew no one was actually watching.

"Um, some pasta, tomato sauce, soup, granola bars, and Fruity Pebbles." Disgusting, but no matter how many cookbooks she read, Hermione couldn't make anything more advanced than boiled water. She started shoving said things into the cabinet. "Oh, and I got your favorite, Mint Cookie Crumble ice cream."

Mom hummed, caught up in whatever trash was on the television. "Yeah, whatever."

She didn't say anything more and started dinner after picking up the mess Mom somehow managed to make by solely sitting on the couch all day. She stirred the pasta mechanically, studying charts from Calculus II over the stove, and contemplating the alternative _proposal _Chief Grindelwald had offered her. She still hadn't signed his contract. What if something bad happened to her while she was at Azkaban? There were dangerous men in prison. Criminals. Murderers. Rapists.

And just who did Grindelwald want her to spy on? Because although he had said otherwise, they both knew what he really meant by _keep tabs on the inmate_. But why would he want a teenager to do what a FBI agent could do one hundred times better?

Hermione left the second plate of ziti in the microwave (if she left it on the counter, Crookshanks would devour it) and was about to carry hers to her bedroom when the front door suddenly groaned open, followed by an unpleasant, familiar deep voice booming through the apartment. Hermione gritted her teeth at the sound.

The loser had returned.

She closed her eyes, sighed, and put down the ziti. It was a Friday night, so maybe this didn't break the _No Mundungus on School Nights _rule,but she would much rather Mom dumped his sorry butt, so the rule could be _No Mundungus on _Any _Nights._ The guy was a creep and a total tool to boot, the only reason Mom was with him was because he supported her fix_._ No better way to keep yourself supplied, after all, than through your stupid drug dealer boyfriend.

The trouble was, drug dealers were the shadiest of all hustlers. All they wanted was money money money – and they didn't have any qualms about how they got it. Twice, Mundungus had already tried to do dealings in their apartment. He would've succeeded, too, if Hermione hadn't phoned the police and scared him off for almost an entire month. Mom hadn't spoken to her for weeks after that.

_And now he's back. _Whatever was left of Hermione's appetite completely disappeared at what she found swaggering into their living room. Mundungus, in his outdated 1990s blue jeans and clinking dog tags, was backed by a crowd of two other junkies dressed similarly. Hermione could tell they were junkies, because they both had the vacant eyes and stupid smiles of someone hooked on H – plus, the scruffy blonde with a bandana tied around his head and black eyeliner was already nodding off. The other junkie, a Hispanic woman who was so skinny her collarbones stuck out like shelves, seemed hostile.

"Jane, baby, you lookin' fine," Mundungus greeted with a sleazy smirk, plopping down on the couch and kissing Hermione's mother deeply. She saw their tongues twist in the air between them and wished dearly for a pick-axe.

God, she hated Mundungus.

"It's good to see you, too," Mom slurred when Mundungus pulled away. She once had candlelight-hazel eyes, but now the cloudy orbs were shrouded in weary lines and yellowed skin. Those dark eyes fell on the strangers standing in her living room with vague recognition. "Who's this, babe?"

"Some friends." Mundungus made himself comfortable and picked a nail, flicking what he found underneath it onto the floor. Hermione's temper sparked. She would be expected to clean that up later, not to mention the mess his crowd would leave after they left. _Hell no, _she thought, balling her fists.

"You can't deal in our house," Hermione snapped, coming forward. Mundungus looked up in surprise and Mom groaned, slinking down into the cushions like a teenager embarrassed by her overprotective parents. The irony of the situation was not missed by Hermione. "I'll call the cops again-" she started to threaten, but was cut off by the thunderous laughter of Mundungus's friends.

"Ooh, 'the cops'!" the blonde man squealed in a high-pitched voice, wriggling his fingers mockingly. He rolled his kohl-rimmed eyes at Mundungus. "Don't listen to this chic, G-Man, I bet you she wants some H too."

Hermione, knowing better than to communicate with any of the people she didn't know in the room, directed her retort at Mundungus. "Tell your losers to get out," she commanded. "Now."

It appeared everyone was too far gone to recognize an insult. Mom started to say, "Hermione, this is adult business…" But she cut her off with a disbelieving snort.

"You heard your mother," Mundungus said, grinning at her the way a wild dog might greet a kitten. He had five gold teeth that gleamed like doubloons against his dark skin, and despite what his horrendous fashion sense suggested, it was no secret Mundungus had serious dough. He ran with some sort of behind-the-scenes crime syndicate no one respectable knew about, which paid him excessively well for his dirty deeds. "Run off to your room, Hermione. Let us do our-" His fingers crept up her mother's thigh. "-_adult_ _business_."

"I know the police chief," she threw out, her last ditch effort. At that, the other two junkies seemed to suddenly take her seriously, shooting subtle glances between their leader and the door. Mundungus rolled his eyes.

"Yeah right. And I'm BFFs with the president." He rolled his shoulders with a series of cracks, popping his neck. "Don't you worry, I'm not doing any business here tonight." He sniffed. "I take care of that shit elsewhere. I'm just here to see your beautiful mother."

Hermione's lips retracted from her teeth. "You're a scumbag who doesn't deserve the mold growing underneath the toilet."

His shaded eyes slid into slits. "I'd watch my mouth if I were you," he growled, half standing up, and ignoring Mom when she attempted to tug him back down beside her. "I've got connections, little girl, and even if I did want to sell something outta your house, what would you do about it?"

"I'd kick your ass."

The junkies cracked up. Mundungus's face colored with rage and he balled his fists, raising one and moving toward her with a violent creak from the couch as he leapt off of it. Hermione thought for a stunned moment that he was going to hit her, but then Mom cried, "_Stop! _Just stop and cut it OUT, damn it!" She grabbed her temples, groaning. "You're all giving me a headache."

Hermione gaped at her. "Mom, he's trying to-"

"Enough, Hermione." Mom reopened her eyes, glaring at her. "Go to your room."

"But you don't understand, he's using you and you're just letting him-"

"Hermione Jean." Mom's voice was unnaturally cold. Hermione stopped. "Go to your room. You're embarrassing me and I don't want to see your face anymore."

Furious and more hurt than she'd ever let on, Hermione hissed, "That's just because I look like Dad, and you're too- too _weak_ to handle it." Mom's mouth opened – it was the most alive she'd looked in the past eight years, Hermione thought – and she screamed at her, but she didn't stay to hear it.

Hermione slammed the door to her bedroom shut and jammed the chair under the knob, in case anyone tried to get in later. She sat down on her twin bed, accidentally squashing Crookshanks' tail, who hissed and fled under the bed. She buried her face in her hands, sitting very still. One hot tear darted out of her eyes. She pressed the back of her fists into them until the rest went away and a blinding white pain filled her skull.

_It's not fair._

Why did her life have to be like this? Why did Dad have to get shot? Why did Mom start stabbing needles into her arms and why did she love that loser in their living room? Why couldn't she make more money? Why did she have to commit crime to pull them through? Why did she feel so angry all of the time? Why, why, _why?_

A claw hooked in the back of her right sock distracted Hermione. She bent down, gently extracting Crookshanks from her foot and muttering "Sorry, Crook." He gave her a superlative look before licking her hand with his sandpaper tongue and shooting off into the hamper. At least, her bedroom was still clean. Mostly.

Hermione reached down for her messenger bag, then remembered she'd left it by the front door outside – as well as her ziti. She would have to go past Mundungus and his creeps again, if she wanted to get it. _That figures. _She sighed and laid back in bed, but sat up quickly when something ripped underneath her. Pulling it out, she found Grindelwald's contract, now torn down the side and wrinkled. Mom hadn't even realized it when she went to the police station last night.

Azkaban Prison, Staten Island. Three days and nine hours per week. Cash. Hermione found a pencil bag underneath her bed, yanked it open, and pulled the cap off of a pen with her teeth. Spitting it out, she found every line with a _x, _signing each with a flourish that left harsh marks on the back of the page.

When all was said and done, she dropped the rumpled contract into an orange envelope and punched a stamp on top. Pulling over her IKEA desk chair until it bumped against the wall, she stood on it and slowly cranked the single bedroom window open.

In the mid-1900s, their apartment had been a basement, a basement with very small windows set high up on the walls, and so while it was easy to shove the envelope through the slit-like gap perpendicular to the ceiling, it took Hermione a few tries before she could get herself up high enough to wriggle through the opening. Once she had, she rolled onto her back on the black asphalt of the alley, gasping in the smell of dumpsters and greasy food, looking up at the porches of a hundred more apartments dazed.

A dandelion wriggling through the broken rubble by her head had an ant crawling on one of its powdery yellow petals. Two spindly black antennas cycled toward her curiously. She hoisted herself up and crammed the envelope in her hoodie pocket, jumping up and down until all the grit had fallen off her back like a dirt shower.

A minute later, her envelope was in the mailbox.

_That's it, _she thought. _I'm going to Azkaban._

* * *

**AN: Thoughts. I know your brain produces them, and I demand you give them to me. Now! **

**Me want chyo brain. (And barefoot sandals.) **

**Kisses!  
ImmortalObsession**


	4. Everyone Has a Price

**AN: Sorry for the delay! Nerve-wracking exams, senioritis, and a little writer's block got the best of me (I was also playing Sims 3) - but I am now back in Kick Butt Writer Ninja Mode. Thanks sincerely for all your reviews and support! **

**And yes, I fully agree that Hermione's mother is a toe rag (Akaru-chan, quit making me snort laugh. It's very ugly.).**

* * *

"Inmate," a voice shouted, as if from down a far, distant tunnel. Laboriously heavy footsteps came to a halt outside of a dark-haired inmate's cell, and the sound of a dozen keys jangling against iron bars roused him as some nameless guard set to work on unlocking the barred door. "Hey sunshine, _wake up. _You got a visitor."

Voldemort opened his stone grey eyes, so swiftly and unhesitatingly the guard paused in the entrance of his cell, wondering if the inmate had been sleeping at all, or simply lying on his cot in wait of an interruption. Whichever one it was, he spoke, smoothly and managing to be even more derisive than the guard's barked orders. "By _visitor _do you mean my attorney-" Eyes cold like the permafrost flashed toward the guard, and an uncomfortable sweat sheathed the man's meaty palms simultaneously. "-or an actual visitor?"

The guard shifted, scratching the back of his neck unconsciously under the inmate's relentless stare. "Well. Your attorney."

Malfoy again. _Can't that useless idiot do anything_ _by himself?_ Voldemort thought in exasperation, sitting up, and running his fingers through his normally more subdued ink black hair warily. The charcoal waves were curling around his head in many unprecedented directions. He snorted to himself. That's what his life had become in the past month since he arrived, jaded and shackled, at Azkaban, hadn't it? _Unprecedented_ _directions_.

He could've used a hot shower, mint tea, and a mirror to speculate the dark mist of stubble audaciously growing along his jawline at 8AM – none of which were available to him until an undefinable later date – but instead he was being escorted by a cowed, overweight prison guard with a hairstyle from 1972 to the Azkaban visiting room.

Yet again.

As they walked through the steel-walled, grid-like halls of Azkaban – pausing at various checkpoints to be administered through bolted gates, at which guards stood waiting to examine their IDs – their presence did not go unnoticed. Or at least, _Voldemort _did not go unnoticed.

Gazes followed his orange form through doorways and the safety glass windows of prisoner workshops, stuck to Voldemort's handsome silhouette like snails on a damp surface. Such a classically beautiful face and infamous reputation called for nothing other than utter fascination, although those things were not the reason for all the attention bore down on him at late.

Since day one, Azkaban had been leeching off the money in Voldemort's back pocket. From the prisoners and guards to the cooks and bathroom janitors, everyone looked to him for hard cash and directive. The kitchen staff had designed him a special meal plan, and whatever he desired was sent to his cell when he didn't feel like coming down to the cafeteria. He only did community service if he wanted to, and he skipped the mandatory daytime classes while the teacher, Ms. Merrythought, loyally penciled him into attendance.

Inmates who didn't already belong to the Noble Blacks would soon, their fates were inscribed by the game of numbers Voldemort had set up in the library, active whenever a guard wasn't circulating, and a prisoner was bored or desperate enough (or sometimes, both) to put what little he owned on the table for a smoke or two. The inmates gambled items from commissary and their loyalty for cigarettes smuggled in by a few guards that had been quick to succumb to Voldemort's seemingly endless cash flow from the very beginning of his sentence.

It was only a matter of time before the foolish inmates were so broke and indebt that they'd be better off in prison for the rest of their lives than out of it. Behind bars or not, Voldemort made a point to be in control wherever fate befell him. The only obligation he couldn't snake or cheat his way out of were Dr. Dumbledore's idiotic therapy sessions, which he loathed with significantly dark passion.

He didn't need shrinks, for God's sake. He needed a _plan_.

Malfoy reviewed the usual stats, while Voldemort corrected this here or gave the confirmation of that there. But the young mobster's mind was elsewhere, plotting what needed to be done to reinstate the Noble Blacks as the underworld hierarchy – not only of New York this time, but half the nation and more – how he was to convince the jury he hadn't killed his uncle with a caliber come his trial at the end of October, what he had to do to prove himself to his men and Cygnus, how to discern the family traitors – and through them, find out who exactly they were working for…and if any of this connected to their rivals, _the Three Brothers, _who he would thereby destroy systematically and mercilessly_._

But most relevant of his unending list of problems was the shipment of heroin stranded in a perilous, media-mobbed Nonthaburi with the Noble Blacks' name on it.

How the hell, he wondered not for the first time, did his foster father expect him to smuggle three hundred keys out of Thailand from the inside of a maximum-security prison? Voldemort's nefarious talents scoped far and wide, in fact he was well-known for his ruthless methods, cunning cleverness, and a wit as sharp as a diamond cutter's wheel, allowing him to sweet talk or dissuade his way out of the deadliest situations…

Still. He wasn't a freaking _sorcerer_.

With this tumult of distressful thoughts in mind, Voldemort barely noticed it when the Thailand news segment snapped onto the TV screen as he passed by the daytime room. _"A death toll of eight hundred has been counted by authorities so far, and over two thousand citizens are still missing," _a woman's voice said compassionately._ "Survivors take shelter in the few streets that have withstood the wrath of this major earthquake, where makeshift infirmaries for the wounded have been set up, and people live in tents made of debris found floating in flooded streets, or the wreckage of levelled buildings…" _

Voldemort grinded to a stop, staring inside. The inmates within were debating over the channels, skimming past cooking shows and cartoons and FX movies. A massive man squatted in front of the television set, his shaved head as tattooed and perspiring as the rest of him. He flipped past the news segment.

"Go back."

The other loiterers in the room looked up at the sound of his voice – unmistakable for its surprising gentleness, so at odds with the imposing wearer – and those who already owed him cash or other forms of pay up hastily looked away, crouching over the pool table or busying themselves with a book as if objects would hide their guilt. But Voldemort wasn't concerned with debts today.

"Back to what?" Shave asked gruffly, thumb hovering over the remote buttons. He looked like he hadn't slept in months. His irritable grizzly bear scowl faded when Voldemort met his red-rimmed eyes with a cold, powerful gaze the color of slate and thunderstorm.

"The news," he answered. He rose his eyebrows expectantly when after Shave had changed the channel, he didn't move. Shave realized this at about the same time and scrambled up off the couch, scratching the back of his gleaming head awkwardly as he trudged away, muttering. Voldemort stared after him for a moment. Something would have to be done about that.

_Another time, _he thought with an inward sigh.

Sitting down, he sat on the edge of the funnel Shave's gigantic body had created in the couch, and turned up the volume, heedless of the others although the braver ones glanced at him curiously and murmured to each other.

Up, up, up. Even on high, the volume sputtered weakly out of the busted speakers.

He leaned forward when the segment resumed after soda and laundry detergent commercials, propping his elbows on his knees. A brunette news reporter in a bright, banana-yellow rain jacket faced the camera, standing in pouring rain in front of the wreckage of what had once been a bridge in Nonthaburi, and recounting the losses of the city, such as damage costs, casualties, et cetera. When another five minutes of this passed by, Voldemort had nearly lost all interest when the reporter suddenly mentioned a New York senator in Nonthaburi today, visiting to show his support.

The camera switched to a view of an airport – the video had clearly been recorded last night, the sky was dark azure in the background, and the lights of the parked private jet shone bright like beaming owl eyes in the nighttime darkness– showing Senator Fudge stepping off his private plane and waving absently at a gathering of reporters trying to shove their microphones down his gullet. The video switched back to the reporter, who explained his niece had married a man from Nonthaburi not too long ago, which was why Fudge was in the city for the week to help the recovery effort, flying food and supplies back and forth from America for survivors.

Like a stroked match, an idea hissed and sparked into brilliance behind Voldemort's narrowed silver eyes, trained intensely on the TV screen.

Cygnus Black had always liked to give advice, probably far more than a man who had spent his life organizing new, inventive ways to profit from people's foolhardiness and misfortunes ever should have. Ironically, only one of his three sons ever humored his inner philosopher – not the exile, or the second eldest Regulus, but the charity case. Voldemort.

The story of how Cygnus had discovered his adopted son's hidden worth – an unlikely knack for cruelty and cleverness disguised by an archangel's face, ensuring the godfather would never fail to share his morbid, worldly knowledge with Voldemort whenever possible, to this day – was a long and complicated one, not worth, in his opinion, recounting. (He despised sentiments, especially those of the familial nature.)

But in short, the two had been thicker than thieves through Voldemort's teen years, their closeness quickly forged by conniving, brilliance, shooting practice on the roof of their penthouse in Tribeca on Sundays – the pigeons never bothered the neighbors again – and his eagerness to learn the art of the ultimate trickery. Theirs was not a typical father-son relationship, for his true father had probably been pale and waxen in a ditch for years by the time Cygnus took him in, and was deader now to him. But Cygnus was an excellent teacher, Voldemort his willing, equally genius pupil.

One of Cygnus's lessons – or _tenets of business,_ as he liked to call them – was that everyone had a price.

The portly figure of Senator Fudge, swathed in a fox fur coat and bowler hat, disappeared inside the airport on the grainy television screen. Voldemort cocked his head, intent on some obscure vision only he could see. "I need to make a phone call," he said, glancing up at the guard lingering on the perimeter of the room. He stood. "Immediately."

* * *

When Hermione woke up for school Monday morning, she was groggy and troll-haired from five hours of crappy sleep, her brain plagued by the gluey remnants of strange dreams of endless, cyber green codes and uncrack-able networks that emitted digital laughter at her dream self's futile attempts to solve them.

_Long night, _she thought, didn't even cover half of it.

A firewall on the pirating website she had to break into and hack passwords from for some troll, _jtrackey79,_ last night had proved more difficult to infiltrate than she'd initially thought it would. She'd had to go manual on a brute force attack when the security all but sneered at her programs, keeping her up past 2AM typing in random commands like an amateur. By the time she finally collapsed into bed, brain-dead and exhausted, her burning red eyes felt like sand pits. Hours of staring into a luminous computer screen was hell for her retinas – without doubt, she'd regret ever inventing Gryffindor once she was half-blind and eye-patched in her mid-30s.

"Crook…_Crook_… MOVE," Hermione ordered, through a mouthful of warm, rumbling cat belly hair. Her Kneazle had snuck up onto her pillow sometime during the night, then migrated onto her face in his sleep. She swatted his furry behind when he feigned sleep, and the cat sprang away with a spiteful yowl, giving her a glowing yellow glare full of feline accusation before emitting a hiss and launching himself under the bed.

Groaning, Hermione sat up and pushed the haywire coils of her nappy brown hair away from her face, squinting at her bed stand alarm clock. Her hair was always frightening in the morning, like the before pictures of a shampoo commercial, meant to horrify customers into buying hair products they didn't need. The alarm clock told her she'd woken up a half hour late. Oh…

_Oh… _

She sneezed. Plucking a long auburn cat hair off her tongue, she shot an accusatory look at the hissing underside of her bed. The hissing underside would have snickered in reply, if manic aggressive cats could do such things.

The school day at Hogwarts proved uneventful, save for the pop quiz Hermione's Chemistry teacher Mr. Snape was rumored to be giving tomorrow, janitor Filch's tirade over the innuendos Sharpied on the girl bathroom stalls, and the fact Harry Potter had still somehow not forgotten all about her. Hermione was unpleasantly shocked every time the scrubbed specimen of Hogwarts Finest – no, _the captain _of Hogwarts Finest acknowledged her presence. Saying hello, beaming at her as he and his polished friends strolled through the commons, and especially when he clapped her amiably on the back on his way to soccer practice with Ron Weasley and Seamus Finnigan at dismissal.

On Monday, her responses to this bizarre behavior had ranged from confounded blank stares to perplexed scowling, and by the middle of the week, they hadn't changed much, except to transcend into an annoyed wariness.

What did Harry _want _from her?

Yesterday, he'd called out to her from within a circle of boat shoe and polo shirt clad boys on the crew team in FACS class – the only class they had together, although Harry hadn't seemed to be aware of this fact before this week – and when Hermione pretended not to hear him, he'd proceeded to _walk_ _over_ and _sit on _her desk. With utmost graveness, he'd asked what her opinion on Mr. Snape's possible asexual status was. "Highly likely," she'd said, prickly as a cactus, with a Sphinx-like gaze that sent him quickly backtracking to his seat, much to the amusement of his friends.

Although, Hermione's abrasiveness hadn't been enough to keep Harry from appearing at her locker before homeroom the next morning, to make sly references concerning Gryffindor and online criminal activity, as if Hermione's illegal side job was a sacred inside joke to be shared between them.

It was _not, _for the record.

To make strange matters stranger, Ginny Weasley had begun to send her long, indecipherable stares whenever the two girls crossed paths. Ginny was a lovely but jealous creature, and every human with self-preservation instincts could tell she thought Harry was her territory. Any females encroaching on that territory were bound to get burned at the stake, unless they were either Ginny's trusted, equally beautiful friends, or ugly enough not to feel threatened by.

If Harry knew about his girlfriend's possessive habits, he didn't let on. All he did was smile, effervescently and infernally, the corners of his green eyes crinkling when his sunny grin predictably gave way to a wave of merry laughter.

God, he was annoying.

Harry's unfathomable interest in Hermione would've been the strangest thing to happen to her all week, if not for her visit with the East Manhattan Chief of Police days ago, or the rescue dog activist she met at the Three Tithes Wednesday afternoon, a middle-aged woman in need of guidance in the art of identity theft. She'd brought a three-pound Chihuahua named Meatball in her knockoff _Coach_ purse, and had dog fur sticking to her vibrant purple pantsuit like a dangerously spreading, hairy rash.

As days rolled by without word from Chief Grindelwald, however, Hermione started to wonder if the chief had forgotten all about her and his proposal. She should've felt relieved – wasn't it a _good thing _she didn't have to go through with her impulsive, scatter-brained plan to work at a maximum security prison? – but instead she felt oddly…bereft. Almost anti-climaxed somehow.

Hermione sat in World History, watching a dull Powerpoint on the comeback of French monarchy when Binns was cut off mid-monologue by the sound of the phone ringing. As he spoke into the receiver, the class broke into fervent chatter, and the girl sitting beside Hermione, Katie Bell, uncovered her Algebra II homework and started working on question thirteen with renewed vigor. Binns hung up after mumbling a few pleasantries.

"Hermione," he said, jerking his thumb at the classroom door. She looked up. "Go to the main office, you have a phone call."

Binns resumed class without any more explanation. Gradually, the students quieted again, and Hermione got to her feet. Tossing some wayward spirals of her recalcitrant frizzy hair behind her shoulder, she walked out, closing the door lightly behind her. She wondered who on earth would call her at school. No one ever had before. After all, Hermione didn't have any family to speak of beside her mother – at least not strictly speaking. Sure, she had a grandmother who lived in Albany and cousins in New Jersey, but she hadn't seen hide or hair of either since Christmas four years ago… Then it hit her.

_Mom. _

At once, she rushed down the mahogany-fitted hall, feet slapping against the glossy hardwood hard enough to smear the wax as she all but dead-sprinted out of the history building – narrowly avoiding a collision with a furious Finch, who had just mopped the floor she almost broke her neck on – and across the vast green grounds to the main entrance: Aragon Hall. Aragon Hall was a small castle with imposing gargoyles hunched behind the quarry balustrades lining the turrets, as if about to spread their bat-like wings and launch into the sky for battle, and a towering façade that blended into a bronze-tipped pinnacle embellished with intricate stonework. The Hogwarts crest, a combination of a rearing lion, curled snake, regal badger, and a raven mid-flight that represented the four founders, pressed into the ashlar stone in a glittering stained glass rendition above the heavy wooden doors. Inside, the main office resided.

By the time she burst in, out of breath and sweating, she half-expected to find the piteous looks of strangers waiting for her, a paramedic inside with Mom snow-white and frozen on a stretcher. But the secretary behind the desk only smiled at her.

"Hermione?" she asked, in a voice made of maple candy and honeydew.

"Yeah. I mean, yes." Hermione made an attempt to compose herself, but her hair had already conformed around her head into a massive curly pom-pom from all the running. Grimacing as the secretary's eyes travelled upward, she said, "Er, Mr. Binns said I have a call?"

"Yes, yes," the secretary chittered, fluttering a hand of burgundy nails toward an ivory antique dial phone Hermione had always thought was just for display. "A relative, let's see…" She shuffled through some papers for a second, while Hermione's hand hovered over the phone. "Gellert Grindelwald," she finished triumphantly. At Hermione's nonplussed expression, she added, "He said he has urgent news for you." She smiled brightly. "Maybe you've won something!"

"Um…yeah. Maybe." But inside, her blood pressure levels were decompressing, a heady relief crashing like a wave under her skin. _She's fine. Nothing happened to her. Nothing happened, _she told herself a few times, before taking a deep breath and raising the phone.

"Hello?" she said warily.

"_Oh good, they finally got a hold of you," _said Grindelwald. He didn't sound as though he'd been on hold for nearly fifteen minutes. Once again, the Chief gave Hermione the disconcerting feeling that all old people weren't the same, and this one in particular might be the one she could grow to like. He also sounded like a campfire: warm, cozy, and crackling with untold stories. But how did he manage to do that over the phone? she wondered. _"How are you, Hermione dear?"_

"Good, I guess," she said, glancing at the secretary, who was typing away at the desktop in an effort to give her some privacy, but beaming excitedly at the monitor. She turned around. "Why?"

"_I was being polite, my dear. Manners were all the rage in the 1800s. You're in class now, aren't you? I didn't interrupt anything too life threatening, did I?"_

Against her will, a tiny smile started to creep across her face at the notion of missing Binn's class being _life threatening_. Grindelwald had probably done the opposite of putting her livelihood in danger, by pulling her out of it. "No," she said. "Just Napolean's misguided attempt to take over Russia in the middle of winter in spring clothes."

Grindelwald clucked. _"Sounds riveting. Now Hermione, the reason why I've called is to confirm your agreement to my proposal…" _

Hermione's heart skipped a beat, the un-reassuring images of _Shutter Island _and _One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest _flashing through her head, but she replied, "I signed the contract, didn't I?" Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the secretary's brilliant smile falter slightly.

More clucking. _"That you did. It was very difficult to get a hold of you, you know," _Grindelwald said chidingly. _"Why don't you have a phone?"_

_Because I've owed the phone company $300 for two years. _"Phones are overrated." She toyed with the old-fashioned spin-around dial, yanking her hand back when the dial tones of ten different numbers blurted across the line. Oops.

"_What was that?"_

"Er, nothing," she said hastily. "What did you need to call me for again?"

"_For confirmation, which you've given me," _said Grindelwald, sounding satisfied either with himself or her answer. _"Since I've got that, I will now send all the necessities to your house so you can prepare for the trip on Friday." _ The sound of muffled shuffling came from his end.

"Friday?" she repeated, startled by the nearness of the date, and also musing what Grindelwald could mean by _the necessities_. "Um, but- what time do I go? I have school."

"_All the details are in the package," _he assured. _"Just keep an eye on the post."_

Hermione frowned. _The post. _It seemed so…archaic. "Can't you e-mail the stuff to me?" she pressed.

"_Not this time. Keep an eye out for it, Hermione. Patience is a virtue," _Grindelwald added, _"And we'll have a meeting sometime after you get back, to see how you're adjusting to the new environment and work out an officialer schedule."_ He was about to sign off, when Hermione suddenly remembered one of the most pressing questions that had been chasing around inside her head since she'd last seen Grindelwald.

"One more thing," she said, clutching the phone to her ear. Grindelwald came back on. _"Yes?"_

"Who's the…" She glanced back at the secretary, dropping her voice. "…you-know-who I'm supposed to watch? Or is that in the package, too?" She waited, but Grindelwald was silent for so long Hermione thought he'd hung up. "Hello?" she asked, and his voice came back on, confident and deep and reassuring.

"_Tom Riddle, if it's any help."_ He said, "_But you won't be able to find him on any public records."_

"Then how do I-"

"_You're a bright girl,"_ Grindelwald said craftily. Hermione had the clear visualization of his bright clever eyes, shining mischievously at her. _"I'm sure you'll figure something out. Too-da-loo."_

The dial tone came on, telling her he'd hung up, and Hermione reluctantly lowered the phone. Tom Riddle. Already, she was itching for her laptop, which she realized as she patted the empty space over her hip where her messenger bag usually resided, she had conveniently forgotten in the history room.

"Do you know the number of – uh – Uncle Gellert? I forgot it and I need to call him back later," she said to the secretary, who looked up with a surprise that was a little too exaggerated, but instantly started to rifle through a pile of papers. Hermione waited, drumming her fingers on the mahogany counter in a jagged staccato.

"Here it is," the secretary said after a few minutes had gone by, straightening in her swivel chair. "Do you want to write it down or-?"

"No, that's alright. Just show it to me." Hermione moved closer, standing on toe when the secretary held the folder up to her. She studied it for a second, then stood back. "Thanks," she said. "Can I go back to class now?"

"There's only five minutes left of the period," the secretary answered, with another honey smile. "Why don't you just stop by your class at the end to get your things?"

Hermione agreed, because it was easier, and she thought about what Grindelwald had said on the long walk across the commons back to class. She ate lunch in the abandoned courtyard, hidden in the back of the labyrinth campus near the sciences buildings, and cracked open her laptop to research. In less than a minute, Google was bringing up search results for Chief Grindelwald's…special case.

Leaning in, she scanned the list. There were some social media turn-ups for Tom Riddle, but all the profile pictures were either of celebrities or anime characters. She tried a few different search engines, but with the same results, and finally used the background check website she normally used for Gryffindor's clients before meeting them in person. Nothing turned up. Her pointer finger tapped the touchpad pensively, while she cocked her head at the laptop screen. _How do I find you, Tom Riddle? _Because by the Web's standards, he didn't exist.

Friday, she consoled herself, would bring all the answers.

* * *

Two more days sped by, and Hermione soon forgot about the mystery convict. She received Grindelwald's package, containing a print-out of directions to Azkaban, her work schedule, a visitor's pass with her school ID picture on the front – how did he manage to get that anyway? – and to her astonishment, a brand-new smartphone worthy of a real Hogwarts student. The stickers hadn't even been taken off the package.

_Too bad I can't use it, _she thought bitterly, playing with the glossy touchscreen as she laid in bed late one night. _But upgraded cellphones don't make the phone bill pay itself. _They didn't transform her into a high class social elite either.

Hermione petted Crookshanks on the head. He hated it, but she could never resist trying every now and then. Quickly, she hopped up and clamped the front door shut behind her before the vengeful Kneazle could get any ideas about biting her good hand off. Hermione slanted her eyes against the blue morning light slashing through the thin gaps spacing the teeth-like rows of brownstones lining her street like braces, and took a deep, bracing breath of October air. It tasted like dead leaves and greasy hot dogs and laundry detergent from the Laundromat down the block and oil-rainbow puddles.

If only she'd known what a disaster this day was going to be, she never would have walked out the front door.

* * *

As had been per usual that week, Hermione was condemned to endure Harry's confusing tendency to exchange pleasantries or velcro himself to her side whenever he saw her around campus. All week she'd been trying to shake him off, pretending not to see it when he waved at her in the Great Hall, ignoring him in class, and never laughing when he gave her the punch line of some lame joke he'd found on the back of a candy wrapper… although it was a _tiny bit _funny that he found them so hilarious.

None of her efforts ever worked, however, even when she proceeded to become ruder and colder in the face of Harry's attempts to break her iciness. Hermione couldn't fathom why he was trying so hard to get her to like him – except for the sneaking suspicion she had that every time she shot him down, Harry became more determined to change her mind about him. Or he was just flat-out obnoxious. Or unaccustomed to being dismissed. Or – more likely – all three of those things.

What was worse was that Hermione couldn't even genuinely _not _like Harry Potter.

_He's too nice, _she thought irritably, changing binders at her cubby with a touch too much force. Hogwarts had an honor system all students swore to abide by when they enrolled in the school, which meant no locks on the cubby doors, and loads of opportunity for pranking or worse.

Still, the _Harry Potter Situation _(Hermione had christened it in her head) wouldn't be too utterly terrible, if not for one problem: Harry's psychotic girlfriend.

Hermione didn't pretend to be oblivious to the hostile looks Ginny – and eventually, Ginny's friends – shot her in the hallways. She even returned them with a choice finger, if just to pop a bubble or two. Hermione wasn't the type of girl to sit back and suffer in silence. This was exactly why eighth period Gym was such an issue.

Ginny and Hermione shared this class, and it was the first day of the volleyball unit. Conveniently, Hermione had made the epic mistake of briefly forgetting Ginny was the captain of the Hogwarts girls' varsity volleyball team. They won championship last year, thanks to Ginny's infamous, winning move: a royal spike. Hermione knew because said spike clocked her right in the side of the face when she was checking the time on the buzzer board during a team rotation – one ball of _wham!, _ominous crunch, and a blaring shock as she smashed to the floor.

"Oh my gosh! I'm so sorry, Hayley. I thought you were ready," Ginny cried, coming over to help her up. Hermione winced, prodding her left ear, which promptly screeched like a banshee. The ominous crunching noise had only been her neck as it snapped aside, not bones. Still, the gymnasium wavered behind Ginny's long glimmering red hair. "Are you alright? Did I hit you really bad?" she asked.

Hermione blinked a few times to refocus her eyes. Through the giddiness of agony, she could see what answer Ginny wanted from her in those Bambi, almond-shaped green eyes of hers: defeat. Pleas for mercy. Tears, if applicable. Sucking in a terse breath, she tried to tell herself those concerned eyes looked like duck crap, not emeralds.

"No, I'm fine," she assured through clenched teeth. "You just caught me off guard."

Ginny's eyes narrowed a touch, but she smiled – venomously. "Well, you better start paying attention, huh? Otherwise, you might get hurt again." She stood back, holding out her hand to help Hermione up.

Hermione smiled once she was on her feet, although her eyes watered when the movement made her ear burn. _Note to self: start bringing Taser to class…and ibuprofen, _she thought. "Sure thing," she said. As Ginny was striding away with the ball tucked under her long arm, she added, "So long as you do too, I mean."

Ginny looked back at her, making no effort to hide the waves of hatred lurking behind the pink lip gloss and bleached teeth now. "Don't worry, Granger," she said levelly. "I already am."

On that note, Hermione Granger had made her first enemy at Hogwarts Institute for Gifted Children…and the painful bleating of her inflamed eardrum promised another poor soul would be soon to follow.

* * *

Because of a detour in the Hospital Wing, which turned out to be located in the fine arts building on the bottom floor and the size of a modest doctor practice, Hermione had missed half of last period and knew much more about the perspective of cardboard boxes than she'd ever wanted to. She went over the speech she'd prepared in her head while sitting in Nurse Pomfrey's office holding an icepack to her cheek, slowly replacing books in her cubby while the students in the hallway buzzed about the upcoming weekend and weaved around her.

"Hey Gryff!"

_Right on time._ Hermione looked up to see Harry lope toward her, waving off a group of tan Hogwarts boys in khakis and boat shoes. He made himself comfortable on the cubby next to hers, his gaze quickly falling on the side of her head. "What happened to your ear?" he said, puzzled. "It looks like a wilted grapefruit."

Hermione glared at him. "You sure you don't have any bright ideas?"

"Um…no." Of all things, Harry seemed amused by her hostility. He tilted his head to get a good look at her. Self-consciously, she touched the bump next to her eye that Nurse Pomfrey gave her an icepack for and promised wouldn't swell. "Unless, you had a run-in with some angry redcaps?" he guessed creatively. Harry took Irish Lit, and he wielded his Celtic knowledge wherever possible. Hermione was not amused.

"Listen Harry, this has to stop," she said bluntly. When Harry only looked at her uncomprehendingly, she rolled her eyes and clarified, "You messing with me all week. It's not funny."

"Messing with you."

"That's what I said, isn't it?" she said testily. "You haven't left me alone since I saw you at the Three Tithes last Friday."

Harry still didn't seem to understand. _Why doesn't he understand? _"I haven't?" he asked, playing with his choppy bangs and scrunching his face in apparent contemplation, seeming to try to remember a point during the past week when he hadn't left her side. Hermione's eyes narrowed further at him.

"What do you want from me?" she demanded. "Why won't you just- just back off already?"

At the intensity in her expression, Harry was so surprised he laughed. This served to make Hermione resemble a humanoid version of Crookshanks on bath day, and her unruly hair may have grown bigger simultaneously. "What?" she growled.

Harry rolled his eyes, dropping his hands at his sides. "I'm not stalking you. This may be a foreign concept to you, but we're friends, Gryff-"

"Stop calling me that!" She rubbed her temples with her fingers. The earlier volleyball-to-head collision was giving her a migraine. "And what made you think we're friends?" she muttered.

Harry looked at her, taken aback. His cheeks flushed slightly. Annoyed, he said, "I don't understand, all I've been is nice to you. Why on earth do you seem so…so _offended?"_

_Because you mock me just by existing. _She turned away. "We don't have anything in common, 'kay?" Hermione said coolly, pretending to straighten some binders in her cubby. "We wouldn't be good friends." Deeming the conversation over, she walked away, but Harry easily matched her pace.

"What makes you say that?" he said hastily.

Hermione glanced at him, scrunching her eyebrows. "What _doesn't_?" she said, looking over his outfit. _It's probably all designer labels, _she thought with disgust. _I bet his shirt costs more than I make in a month, made of 100% llama fur or something. _

"I know about your dad."

She stopped dead in her tracks. Harry, who was still speed-walking, barreled right past her before he realized she'd stopped and turned around. He seemed to regret what he said, but it didn't matter – it was still unforgiveable. Hermione stared him down, burning all over. Slowly, she said, "How do you-?"

"And I know you're here on scholarship."

Hermione looked dumbfounded. That expression quickly disappeared, however, replaced by a deep suspicion. She looked around the mostly empty hallway. Slipping open her messenger bag and cocking her finger at Harry, she gestured for him to come closer.

Looking chagrined, Harry stepped toward her with his hands fidgeting like jumpy ants in his shorts pockets. "Listen, Gryff – er, Hermione, I didn't mean for it to come out that way- _OW!"_

Hermione dropped the Calculus II textbook back into her bag, while Harry held the swelling bruise on his jaw and let loose a string of curses. She said, "If you tell anyone about my financial situation, or if you already have, I'll tell Principal Dippet all about those changed Chemistry grades and get you expelled. In fact, I might do that whether you tell or not."

"What?" Harry was bewildered. "I wasn't going to tell-"

"Oh really?" she scoffed, poking him hard in the chest. He jumped back. "Then what are you doing? Rubbing it in? How _pitiful _I am? Are you going to try to throw a charity ball in my honor with all your rich friends? Going to laugh at me and my lowly apartment? My _job_?" Her eyes more unnerving than ever, she snarled, "I won't be ashamed of the fact that I work for what I got, just because everything pretentious assholes like you want is-is _given_ to you."

Harry's eyes widened.

Glancing over his stunned face, Hermione seemed to be satisfied she'd scared him enough. She hiked her messenger bag up higher on her shoulder, tossed her wild hair, and walked off. Harry Potter watched her go in astonished silence, rubbing the bruise on his cheek with a frown.

* * *

**AN: Oh Harry, you should've known better than to try blackmail with Hermione, really now... She _does _own a Taser. *tut tut***

**Next chapter: _Welcome to Azkaban. _(A certain Voldyboy may or may not meet a certain hacker, I'm not really sure. I just hear things. Whaddawhadda. Blehdbloop. Ignore me.) **

**If you have any predictions, exciting riddles, feels, and/or death threats for me, please leave them in review format below! **

**Kisses!  
****ImmortalObsession**


	5. Welcome to Azkaban

**AN: As many of you pointed out, canon Ginny has brown eyes, and in _Hack It! _they're green. But because it's a small flaw, I'm just going to keep it, although I thank those of you who pointed this out to me. :) Anyway, on with the chapter!**

* * *

The subway roared through the underground tunnels of Manhattan, rocking its inhabitants to and fro, like an extremely cumbersome vat of gelatin. A girl sat sandwiched between a family of five, arguing over _Temple Run _and shoving an iPad back and forth over her head. Her fingers drummed an uneven beat on the bulky messenger bag she carried, hawkish eyes intent on the tiny lights of the city map, pinging out of sight as the tram passed them.

_Ping ping ping._

When an automated voice announced they'd reached Lexington Ave, she was already halfway out of the subway car.

Hermione recalled Grindelwald's instructions on how she would reach Azkaban, pocketing her Metro Card and starting the walk down West Street to the Staten Island ferry. It left in five minutes, and she would catch the return ride after she was done at Azkaban, taking the subway all the way back to Queens – hopefully, with enough time still left to complete a few Gryffindor requests.

The only memory of boat rides she had was of Dad holding her up to the porthole of the Ellis Island ferry once, and a hasty glimpse of the back of the Statue of Liberty as they slid over the river. She didn't remember much of the actual island, just a museum about immigration that had been excruciatingly boring to her seven-year old mind, and endless stairs. The hotdog she ate from the concession was a vivid recollection, however, since it had made a ferocious reappearance on the deck of the ferry.

She hoped seasickness was a thing people were supposed to outgrow.

Staten Island, a vaguely shaped mass on the opposite side of the dark blue Hudson River, had Azkaban Prison waiting somewhere inside it. But Hermione already knew what she would see in detail when they got up close.

Like Grindelwald had said, Azkaban was a state prison, situated miles away from the mainland or any signs of urban life. An aerial shot of the prison on Google showed flat grey buildings and lots of concrete, a sorry sight no soul could wholeheartedly say she was anticipating. Azkaban had almost been shut down in 1978, because of low funds, dangerous construction, and poor treatment of the prisoners, but it had undergone a radical reform since then, thanks to the arrival of new staff and an incredible donation from an anonymous philanthropist that saved it.

More recent articles Hermione had found on the Internet said the prison was also in the middle of an upgrade, installing a new and improved air-tight security system, and motion sensors all over the facility. So at least, if a chainsaw murderer bent on a killing spree got loose, Hermione would be trapped inside with him.

Up ahead and much bigger, a hulking swirl of stirring grey clouds conveyed the forecast awaiting her on the island. Although the deck was off-limits when a storm was in the area, Hermione had managed to slip on, leaning against the safety railing to watch the choppy waves below batter the chipped, tangerine-orange hull. A salty breeze sprayed her face, giving her a sporadic craving for seafood, and three drops that were either river water or rain knocked on her hair softly. They were almost under the storm clouds now.

"I do not get seasick," she muttered under her breath, concentrating on the enlarging complex of buildings and green above the roughing water. Her fingers flexed around the metal railing too tightly. "I do _not _get seasick."

When the ferry finally anchored at the dock, Hermione had been long driven inside by the rain and an angry security guard who caught her outside. She emerged with the overflowing procession of tourists and commuters onto the slippery station. Jerking up her hood, she ran out to the street, finding a maple tree to stand under until her ride showed. The vinyl cord of the visitor's pass necklace Grindelwald gave her, lying safely under her sweatshirt, scraped against her sticky neck.

Mist fuzzed the roads, blocking out the landscape into blue outlines and smudgy suggestions. She searched the fog banks for a glimpse of a taxi, pushing dripping curls out of her face. _I can already feel them frizzing, _she thought with a grimace, trying to finger-comb her hair into presentation, but it was no use. For some reason, her hair had a chemical reaction with rainwater, the product of which spelled out disaster no matter how much conditioner she put into it.

The wheezing sound of an exhausted engine near the end of the road broke her thoughts. Hermione skittered out to the side of the road and stuck her arm in the air, at which an ancient green minivan honked three times and jerked aside to zoom up alongside her. On the side of the minivan, the logo _the Knight Bus _jumped out at her in strips of peeling purple graffiti.

"Hi. You go to Azkaban, right?" she said breathlessly, hopping in when the driver shoved open the passenger door, and immediately starting to feel the beat-up upholstery for a seatbelt. In the driver's seat, a man with deep gold-chocolate skin and a thick West Indian accent greeted her cheerfully in broken English. His name was Stan and he played Bob Marley as they drove, bopping his head and yapping in rapid Creole on his Bluetooth, seemingly impervious to the weather outside.

The windshield wipers slashed back and forth hectically, and although it was already cold Stan turned the A/C on to keep the condensation on the glass at bay. Hermione was working on squeegeeing her soaked hoodie onto her jeans, which were already done for in the soluble department, when out of nowhere the rain shower doubled in force, transforming into a liquid meteor shower that drowned out _Rebel Music _within seconds. The downpour was so thick she couldn't see the road.

"Don't worry, young lady," said Stan. At first, Hermione thought he was talking to whoever was on the other end of his Bluetooth before he flashed her a luminous smile, crooked teeth glowing like Christmas lights against his dark skin.

"I'm good driver," he assured her. "No worries." As if to prove it, the speedometer needle inched up to eighty-five and Stan drove one-handed, resuming his conversation, lighting a cigarette, and simultaneously texting a cousin on his cellphone. Hermione's eyes widened, the mental image of _the Knight Bus_ wrapped like a soft pretzel around a lamppost blurting across her head. When she had imagined going to Azkaban, she'd thought the violent criminals she would encounter would be the worst threat to her livelihood, not the _taxi_ _driver_.

Sooner than later, the Knight Bus cruised up to Azkaban, revealing an estranged, enormous enclosure in the middle of the monsoon. Stan paid the imposing prison no mind as they drove the winding road around it, but Hermione's eyes were glued to the window. From the wide barren landscape consisting of two scrawny crab apple trees and a thirty-four foot high cement wall barricading most of her view, her first impression of Azkaban was not inspiring.

The prison, she saw when they were closer, was actually a scattered collection of huge block buildings connected by a network of channels that were probably security checkpoints, with a pithy basketball court toward the back of the property. Topping the formidable cement wall were frenzied coils of barb wire, covered in _Warning: High Voltage_ signs at intervals, and – occasionally – gun posts.

Hermione knew Azkaban was a maximum security prison, a place just one rung below the home of the lowliest of infamous sociopaths, but still she hadn't expected the prison to look so…so…

Well, _cold_.

When they reached the gate, Stan put on the breaks and honked five times in quick succession. There was the barest of pauses, and then the gates of Azkaban had begun to open, dragging over the gravel road like claws across a chalkboard, moving slowly enough that Hermione wondered how successful Azkaban's supposed renovations were proceeding. Or if they were proceeding at all.

The sound of the car doors unlocking snapped Hermione out of her rivalry. "This is where I drop you off, young lady," Stan announced.

Hermione pulled her soggy hood back up – it was a pathetic protection against the raging-typhoon-meets-tropical-rainstorm outside, but all she had. Even if she'd thought to bring an umbrella, she doubted it would have held against the wind. "Where do I go next?" she asked Stan, one hand on the door.

"Go straight. Follow the reds."

"Reds?"

"The cameras." Stan pointed through the windshield and she looked up, to see a _red_ focusing on them from its post on a sky-high light tower, where a menacing tier with attached guns glared at them powerfully. Surprised, she stared at the tiny crimson light, blinking to show the camera next to it was recording. She hadn't noticed it at all – she wasn't sure if that fact, or the red's presence unnerved her more. "Some of them go along the entranceway going inside. They have 24/7 surveillance here," Stan went on, mistaking her sudden sharpness for worry. "You will be safe."

She nodded. "Thanks for the ride." Hermione climbed out of the van and backed up a few feet. The Knight Bus reversed and Stan hit the gas, squealing away onto the rain spattered road. She took a deep breath. _Duke University and a dentistry practice in Venice, _she reminded herself, walking through the open gate. _This will all be worth it when I'm filling cavities in Italy._

The doors of the entrance building were glass and automatic, they slid apart like a pulled zipper at Hermione's approaching footsteps. A burst of warm air spread over her when she passed a heating duct on the way inside. She glanced around the large empty room, although she didn't know what she was looking for. A secretary maybe? Welcome desk? The S.W.A.T. team? Sherlock Holmes?

Great. Mom's detective shows were getting to her head again.

"Hello?" she called, and her voice echoed, a startling sound in the emptiness. No one responded. She took a survey of the lobby once more. There were two halls branching off on either side of the main entrance, which split into more and more halls; steel walls, and linoleum flooring. The reds were everywhere.

"Ma'am! Ma'am, who are you?" a man's voice boomed, startling her, and accompanied by the sounds of heavy boots clunking against the floor.

Hermione raised her head, more bewildered by the _ma'am _than the lanky prison guard coming toward her. "Uh, Hermione. Hermione Granger," she said, rooted to the floor by the guard's severe gaze, which eventually gave way to recognition at her next words. "I'm the volunteer." She tried not to say _the volunteer _like there were invisible quotation marks around it, but it came out that way anyway. She winced.

"Wonderful," the guard muttered, although his tone didn't reflect his description. His nametag read _Dementor _and when he stopped before her, Hermione thought she could understand why someone with a name like that could be so melancholic. Dementor had washed-out greasy red hair, pale toad-like eyes, and a seemingly permanent scowl etched onto his exhausted face. His amphibian eyes regarded hers hostilely.

"Alright, come with me," he said gruffly, readjusting his belt and the heavy nightstick strapped to it. "We'll go through security check and I'll give you the rounds. After that, I'll drop you off to Dr. Dumbledore and you can get started."

"Dr. Dumbledore? Who's that?" Hermione asked, falling into step with the grumpy prison guard when he started to lead them down the right hallway. "He's the psychologist here," Dementor answered, seeming disgruntled by her inquisitiveness. "Evaluates inmates under observation so we can know how to place them, and he runs the AM and PM group talks. You'll be participating in the latter."

She was participating in prison therapy? Now _that _should be interesting. "What will I be doing?" Hermione said curiously.

Dementor looked at her, his natural scowl deepening. "Do I look like the psychologist?"

Hermione glanced over his lined, glaring face and refrained from commenting on Dementor's looks.

They proceeded to security check, where she found several more grumpy prison guards, and was instructed to empty out her pockets and hand over all suspicious possessions on her person. Kicking off her distressed Converses for them to search along with her bag, she stepped to one side of the metal detector and held out her arms, so another guard could give her a pat down. She glared indignantly at him when he frisked her snarled wet hair with a pensive look on his face. What did he think she was hiding in there, bombs?

"All clear," he finally said, reluctantly. Hermione's eyes narrowed.

When Hermione was finally deemed legal (except for her eight-ounce hand lotion, which they decided wasn't trustworthy and threw out, much to her annoyance), she joined Dementor on the opposite end of security. At least, she had opted against bringing her Taser to school today, she reflected.

"This building is where most of our activities occur," Dementor said flatly, beginning the tour in a decidedly Mr-Binns-esque fashion. His voice was as depressing as his charisma – or lack thereof. Hermione dreaded the inevitable yawn-inducing information bound to come. "What we're passing now is the cafeteria," he said. "Meals are held three times per day here. All inmates work jobs, like custodial services, kitchen duties, clean-ups, et cetera, so they can meet their daily quotas. Education is a privilege – one that can be taken away – so not all the inmates take classes here, depending on their behavior and cooperation."

Hermione nodded. They left the mess hall and started down a different hallway, their footsteps the only sounds to be heard aside from the constant, insectile whirring of the reds. She couldn't stop glancing at the watchful cameras, which gave the prison a decidedly eerie, haunted mental hospital-esque ambiance, but Dementor seemed to have all but forgotten their existence completely.

"We're about to enter the building where inmates live," he said after they were admitted through another gate. The guard who let them through glanced over them both closely, before waving them on with a bored expression. "In a maximum-security prison," Dementor continued, "inmates are required to live one to each cell, but space has been tight lately around here so we room inmates to about seven per." He turned left. Hermione's eyes widened. "Inmates under observation, however, do get their own cells," he added peculiarly, "as well as…special cases."

_Special cases. _Why did that sound familiar? Was it a politer synonym for stir-crazy, maybe?

"…Wake-up calls are at 6:30AM sharp. At 7 o' clock, we do inspections and head count. 7:15 is breakfast in the cafeteria," Dementor was saying when she tuned back in, ticking the items off on his fingers. "Head counts, keep in mind, are imperative here," he said gravely. "If you lose an inmate, his escape is not the worst thing that could happen."

Hermione glanced at his dour face, unsure whether or not she should be perturbed. "What _is_ the worst thing that could happen?"

Dementor gave her a dull look she guessed was supposed to be intimidating. "About twenty years ago in Sacramento Prison," he began, with all the storytelling flair of a dead cactus, "a head count after activities was missed for one group, and the guards watching the group didn't realize a highly-dangerous prisoner was not with them when they returned to the cafeteria for dinner. The prisoner in question was committed there because he'd murdered his four children by drowning them in the river behind his lake house twelve years before. That night, when all the inmates were asleep, the prisoner got hold of a guard's gun, and murdered three staff and an inmate he thought were his children come back to life. Then he tried to climb the fence and got electrocuted to death."

Hermione swallowed. "Don't forget head counts," she repeated, repressing the urge to glance over her shoulder and check for any gun-wielding escapees. A shiver crept over her. "Got it."

Dementor started talking about inmate privileges.

They entered the cell unit, which turned out to be the only part of Azkaban Hermione had visualized correctly. The vast building they entered was five floors high, and on each floor barred cells that had been repainted in a sanitized shade of eggshell stood three feet apart each, lining the walls in long, meticulous rows. Some inmates sat inside of the cells, every one wearing the faded orange jumpsuits iconic of prison life, and lounging around idly. Hermione guessed most of them were elsewhere, in class or doing work.

"Are these all of the cells?" she whispered to Dementor, keeping her voice low as they passed the inmates.

"No, only about a third of them," he explained. "This is Cell Unit D. You might see more if you ever go in the other units-"

He was cut short when one of the inmates spotted them and screamed _Fish!, _which elicited an uproar of raucous laughter. Hermione didn't know what a fish meant here in Azkaban, but she didn't doubt it wasn't meant to be taken as a compliment – or that it was directed at her. One of the guards responded to the first voice in kind, threatening to strip privileges for misconduct. The threat was ignored and soon the entire first floor was hooting and catcalling and shouting. _"Fish! Fish! Fish!" _they all chanted.

Dementor grunted and shot her an accusing look – Hermione scowled in return. How was this supposed to be her fault? With another contemptuous glance at the room of crowing prisoners, Dementor quickly ushered them away while the staff tried to calm the inmates down.

"Well, those are the inmates," he said drily, once they were far away enough to speak again. Ears ringing, Hermione glanced back at the chaos they'd just left, but the barred gate behind them had already been shut.

It was easy to tell when they entered the older section of Azkaban, yet to be renovated and taking the form of a long, dimly-lit hallway with flickering ceiling lights, and the putrid scent of a bathroom on 45th street hanging like suicide in the dense air. The dark corridor ended at another gate, where a heavy-set prison guard buzzed them through, into another building.

For the next half hour, Dementor showed Hermione the work rooms, commissary, daytime room, the infirmary, classrooms, and finally the yard, where outdoor activity was organized and the pitiable basketball court she saw before was presently being pummeled into dust by the vicious rainstorm. The tour would have been interesting, if not for the fact Dementor made her history teacher's, Binns, class seem as thrilling as a Las Vegas vaudeville act.

Hermione kept herself awake through the mind-numbingly dry sound of Dementor's raspy tones by memorizing all the routes of Azkaban they had walked through and retracing them in her head for future reference. She also counted the number of reds they passed.

She glanced up as they strode through another gate checkpoint. _108._

"This is Dr. Dumbledore's office," Dementor announced at last, halting outside of an unassuming office door. "Good luck."

"Am I supposed to-?" Hermione stopped talking when she realized Dementor had already walked away. She sighed, turning around to knock on the door – and came to face-to-face with the inquisitive gaze of Dr. Dumbledore instead.

_When did he get there? _she wondered, eying the older man standing in the doorway with surprise. At the sight of his pressed burgundy suit, embroidered with little crescent velvet moons and threaded silver stars under a fuzzy bathrobe, she wondered how long Dementor's tour had actually been.

"Good evening - Miss Granger, is it?" Dumbledore greeted in a heavy British accent, shaking her hand firmly when she nodded. "Welcome to the Azkaban Correctional Facility."

Hermione's brows furrowed. "Don't you mean Azkaban Pri-?"

"Oh no, I always mean what I say," he said, shaking his head sternly and giving her hand one last tight squeeze before letting go. She flexed her fingers, surprised by the tingle in them. "A prison is a cage, Miss Granger, and this place is by no means that. Azkaban is a safe haven where individuals who have used up all of their last chances are given one finalchance, and not judged for their past actions." Dumbledore clasped his hands behind his back, staring past her and thinking for a drawn-out moment. Hermione squirmed, not sure what to do or say. She hadn't been reprimanded since she was eight, and had long since forgotten what to do in the face of chiding.

And the doctor's pajamas kept distracting her.

"Well anyway," said Dumbledore, coming back to the land of the living with an abruptly cheerier air. He looked at her knowingly. "You don't want to hear an old man's philosophies, do you? But how are you? I hope your trip here wasn't too taxing? You came over from Queens, correct?" Everything the doctor said ended in an arch, a conventional question that always welcomed answers no matter what shape or form they took. If his profession was a question to Hermione before, it certainly wasn't now.

"Er…yes." Disconcerted by the seamless switch from Lecturing Scholar to Friendly Inquisitor, Hermione struggled to catch up. "It's raining pretty hard outside though," she said, gesturing uselessly at the pounding rain, which didn't have a sliver of hope of being heard through the three-foot thick steel walls surrounding them. "With the storm and all."

Dumbledore frowned. "Oh yes, I heard about that. Nasty out there. Ah well, it's always raining somewhere, isn't it?"

Turning on his heel, he locked the door to his office with an impressive set of hefty keys he'd extracted from his bathrobe. They jingled when he replaced them in his pocket. "Come along then," he said. "We've got to go."

"Go where?"

"To the session room." Before she could ask what that was, Dumbledore continued, "I assume you've been given a tour already, by one of the guards?"

"Yes, but-" She stopped in order to catch up to Dumbledore, who was striding down the hall at a vigorous pace for a seventy-something-year old man, and smiling enigmatically. Idly, she wondered what the inmates did when _he _walked through the cell unit. "Dementor said you could tell me exactly what I would be doing here, Dr. Dumbledore," she hedged, once she had caught up.

"Of course." Dumbledore's face brightened. "Well, you'll be working alongside me, which I hope you don't mind too terribly." A cheerful smile was sent her way, disappearing behind the white tufts of his long, gently curling beard again before Hermione could figure out if he was joking. "On a usual day," he went on, "you'll arrive here, go through security check as you did today, and Dementor will escort you to either the session room or my office, depending on my schedule that day." He paused, looking at her for confirmation. "But you're only coming in on the session days, isn't that right? For the PM shift."

"Yes." _I think?_

"Good, very good. And then the filing you'll do later…" Dumbledore drifted out of one subject and right to another, sawing his hands together excitedly. "Now group therapy is where the real fun begins. We're a bit late today, but worry not, it isn't serious. You and I oversee the session – oh, it's very easy, Miss Granger. All you do is make sure they don't stray to any less-than-inspiring topics, like drugs, death threats, strapping bitches, et cetera – whatever it is they like to converse about these days, you know." Hermione's jaw dropped, but Dumbledore continued obliviously. "And I would be just _thrilled_ if you could help me by taking part in our discussions. Not all of the patients are very chatty, naturally, although I have a feeling your presence might change that."

"How so?" she said reluctantly.

"I have no idea, it's just a hunch," said Dumbledore, touching his beard with a purse of his lips. Unlike Grindelwald's clipped goatee, Dumbledore had a silvery mane that went to his navel and was more than slightly unruly. If he had _payot, _gall, and a beady, grilling gaze, he would've looked just like Hermione's moody Jewish grandfather from Georgia.

Dumbledore stopped them at a door, exchanging pleasantries with the security guards on duty around it, all of which seemed to be on friendly terms with him. "Miss Granger," said Dumbledore, catching Hermione before she could go inside. "You do know this is not a job for the light of heart," he asked her, lowering his voice. "Don't you?"

Hermione frowned. "Do I seem lighthearted?"

Dumbledore considered her, probably psychoanalyzing or forming diagnosis based on the defensive hunch of her shoulders and the height of her chaotic hair – or whatever it was therapists were really thinking when they looked at humans. Nodding thoughtfully, he murmured, "Maybe not."

Satisfied, Hermione started to walk past him, but the doctor caught her shoulder again at the last minute. She looked from his withered hand to him, confused, and was taken aback by the ferocious intensity crackling like livewires in his blue gaze. Oddly, it reminded her of…

…Well, _her. _

That was strange.

"I've seen lots of people come and go in my line of work, for a variety of reasons," he said quietly, searching her eyes thoroughly. "I hope you will be one of the few who surprises me."

"What do you mean?" she said, puzzled.

"I mean, keep acting tough. It works on you." Dumbledore straightened, letting her go finally. "After you, Miss Granger."

Hermione was stunned, but she walked into the session room as ordered. Overly personal therapist or not, she was here for a reason, and nobody was going to scare her off. Her eyes swiftly swept over the session room, cataloging the details.

Six inmates sat in metal fold-up chairs arranged in a rough circle. A tall, scrawny man with a gaunt face, brown skin, and hazel eyes was the closest to the front door, and sitting next to him were what looked to be two bodybuilders. These men had glossy looks about them – not like they were stoners, which Hermione would've recognized in a heartbeat, but as if their IQ scores weren't on the high end of the seesaw, per se. The men formed a solid pack of muscle, and both had similar round faces, buzz-cuts, and tiny piggish eyes. _If it wasn't for the steroids, _she thought in a rare moment of black humor, _they could be Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum._

She looked across from the giants, finding a stout, broad-shouldered man with Slavic cheekbones and neat shoulder-length auburn hair. His jaw was square, curving into a proud dimpled chin in the center, and he had flirtatious green eyes. Next to him, a stand-offish black man with bleached blonde hair jogged his feet in place restlessly, running his hands over his face like he thought there was something on it every other minute, and in the very back, another man leaned so far back in his seat the front half rose off the floor. His head was turned, so all she could see of him was thick black hair. That unpleasantly reminded her of Harry – which made her stomach turn with something she refused to analyze – so she quickly looked away.

By the door, Dumbledore was trying to rattle free a fold-up chair from the cart a guard had brought in sometime earlier. The fluorescent ceiling lights poured harsh light over the room, but the back right bulb was broken and flickering, where a trapped bee stupidly threw itself against the glass wall inside it. This room hadn't been upgraded yet clearly, judging by the scribbles on the chipped walls and suspicious stains on the floor. A single red watched over all of them, perched eternally recording over the table jammed against the wall to her right.

Dumbledore offered a clipboard to Hermione, handing over a pen as well and gesturing to the fold-up chair he had wrestled free. She mumbled thanks and sat down, avoiding all of the raking eyes trained on her. She wanted to wrestle her Medusa-like mane into a ponytail, but thought it would be too obvious now. Dumbledore took the seat on her left.

"Good evening, everyone," he began, smiling benignly at the chattering group, who fell into quiet after an expectant moment. "I would like to make a small breach in our routine today by introducing our new intern – whom you may have already noticed – Hermione Granger. She'll be with us for a little while from now on, I believe she's here from her school and interested in studying criminal justice. Is that right, Miss Granger?"

"Mostly." As in, it was the cover story Grindelwald had written for Hermione in their email correspondence. Hermione cleared her throat, speaking louder when it was obvious no one had understood or heard her. She always mumbled when she was nervous. "I would love to become a detective – and actually, I'm just a volunteer," she clarified uneasily, cracking her knuckles to curb the anxious drum in her chest, and forcing herself to glance around at the faces staring at her. _Ugh. And I thought class presentations were bad… _

"Really?" Dumbledore said in surprise. She nodded. He seemed to catch onto the hint that Hermione refused to utter another syllable without extreme prodding, because he smoothly moved on.

"Now-" With one promising lift of his broad eyebrows and a quirk of his lips, the aura of enthusiastic energy around Dumbledore revived like a holy resurrection. The group sunk lower in their chairs at the excited glint in his eye, much like students did in class when the Hogwarts English teacher, Mrs. McGonagall, announced, _Next week's thematic essay is on…! _"-why don't we all introduce ourselves to Miss Granger here before we open discussion," he said. "State your name and-" He paused, as if debating what personal information was safe enough for a convict to volunteer. "Well," he said at last. "We'll just go on from there."

The doctor didn't wait for a volunteer and pointed at the skinny man first, seated across from him. The man's entire face shrunk into a leer immediately, he shouted, "What you picking me first for, huh, Dumbles? What'd I do to you? What _the fuck _I do to you? Did I do something to you? No? Then why'd you pick me? You got a problem with me, a stick up your ass? Is that it, Dumbles, you got a-?"

"You didn't do anything at all." Dumbledore was unfazed and soothing. Hermione, stiff with shock in her chair, was stunned to see the manic inmate start to calm down at his words – although he did it slowly, jerking with small, irrepressible twitches that wracked through his whole body in his chair. "Why don't you just introduce yourself to Miss Granger?" he asked reasonably.

The man's eyes sharpened with irritation, but he said, in a disgruntled growl, "Cuss Carrow." The group gave their first round of sniggers at _Cuss_.

"Your full first name please?"

"What? You copping bull-?"

"_Full name."_

"Amycus." The word was a snarl. Carrow added impatiently, "Amycus Carrow, god damn it. Is that all, you needy bi-?"

"Yes, thank you, Mr. Carrow," Dumbledore said drily. "Next?"

Hermione wrote down the group members' names as Dumbledore's procedure continued, along with a small physical description of said inmate each time. She could never remember people's names – or anything – unless the information was paired with a visual, and she hoped her fastidious note-taking would jog her memory later.

The two Incredible Hulks turned out to be Crabbe and Goyle, and the European, Antonin Dolohov, spoke in a liquid Russian accent and had a habit of tapping his boxlike chin in thought every time he broke off mid-sentence – which was often. Bartemus Crouch Jr. was skittish as a field mouse, and the inmates called him _Twitch_ for obvious reasons. The name Crouch tickled feathers at the back of Hermione's brain. Before she could figure out why, Dumbledore had moved onto the final prisoner: the man who hadn't looked up once during the entire session. The inmate whose name she had an inkling she already knew.

Dumbledore waited expectantly, but the group averted their eyes, seeming to suddenly decide the name game wasn't enticing as it had been a minute ago. Hermione frowned, glancing between their averted gazes and the final prisoner. _He_ couldn't be the cause of their disinterest, could he? He certainly didn't seemintimidating, only…_slight. _Especially compared to the two giants, Crabbe and Goyle. And he was young.

Too young to be in a prison for the rest of his life.

Then again, there was a _something_ about the inmate that rubbed Hermione the wrong way, although she couldn't pinpoint the source of the something. She only knew he vaguely reminded her of the haughtier Hogwarts students. What was that, rolling off of him like radiation from a nuclear plant? She stared, as if looking hard enough would make his strangeness visible, her eyebrows crammed together, trying to determine it.

Then suddenly she knew what the something was. And the knowledge crawled over her skin like a cockroach, explaining without explanation why she'd gotten a bad vibe from him without even hearing him speak.

He vibrated with _entitlement. _

He was entitled_. _Privileged. Bored. Isolated by his own gloating reflection. Hermione saw the expression of the rich every day for six hours, the natural carelessness pampered people carried around with them like a virus. She could see it in the lazy slouch of his wide shoulders, the softness of his sheltered ivory skin that seemed to say _I have grown up in a perfect, untouchable bubble. I do not know hunger or worry_. But this inmate wasn't a Hamptons package, she reminded herself, focusing. He was a murderer. Or worse.

Judging by the way no one save Dumbledore directly looked at him, he was definitely the worse kind.

"Something wrong?" said an unassuming voice, pliable as soft butter, yet clearly audible. Hermione blinked, wondering where such softness had come from - and then The Worst raised his head and glared at her.

_Holy shit, _was all she could honestly think of for a solid ten seconds._ He's gorgeous._

Hermione couldn't even help it when her eyes widened at the sight of the inmate head-on. Edgy, she thought, didn't even begin to cover him. Now that he was sitting up, she could see the mop of ash black hair she'd seen before was actually cropped short and artfully swept aside, strands of it dashing into a pair of eyes that were a striking blue-grey and staring daggers at the entire room from under his silver right eyebrow piercing. He wasn't slight like she'd first thought either, but lean and mean, with smoky black tattoos snaking out of the cuffs of his jumpsuit, twining around two pale wrists like ink hugs as the hints of more sinewy shapes curled mysteriously under his shirt collar.

The glowering, moody figure even had high fluted cheekbones. (This last asset was absolutely unfair, Hermione had always envied people with high cheekbones and despised her own childishly round face.) Still, the question remained: How had _that _ended up in Azkaban Prison?

The chair the inmate sat on creaked, as he sank more fully into a boneless slouch and tipped his whole weight on one flimsy back leg of the metal chair. He almost seemed to be imitating a meditating monk – or mocking one.

Hermione abruptly remembered he had said something.

"Sorry what?" she said stupidly. _Sorry. _Of all the _moronic _things she could've said.

_Sorry._

Kill her now.

The inmate – who had never been addressing her, as it turned out, but Dumbledore - arched a brow at her cavalierly, as if he'd just found a cockroach laying eggs on the carpet of his Aston Martin. Hermione knew the look well; she'd been on the receiving end of it for the past week, although usually the supercilious sender was Ginny Weasley – not some psychotic killer with attitude problems.

"Was I talking to you?" he asked, eying all of her slowly. Not the usual way boys eyed girls, but the way humans stared at wriggly, eight-legged creatures who had encroached on their abodes. Despite herself, Hermione felt her ears grow fire hot. An awkward, dense silence stretched across the room.

In the background, Dumbledore pinched the bridge of his nose, which Hermione had only just vaguely realized was very crooked, in an exasperated gesture. Clearly, this type of behavior from the guy wasn't out of the norm. Clearly, looks didn't promise personality.

"Mr. Riddle," the doctor said warily. "Would you be so kind as to introduce yourself to Miss Granger?"

Riddle turned his head, to spear Dumbledore with the same cocked silver brow and arrogant stare Hermione had just been treated with. Somehow the conceit served to make him even more attractive, which was just ludicrous. _You've got to be kidding me, _Hermione thought, prickling all over and clenching her fists tight enough to turn white in her lap. _That's Tom Riddle? _The_ Tom Riddle I'm here because of?_

Fate sure had some wicked sense of humor.

"But didn't you just introduce me, Albus?" the brat said innocently.

Dumbledore smiled, even though Hermione was positive he wanted to punch Riddle's face in as badly as she did. "Yes, but I would like _you_ to introduce yourself, if you please," he said, with incredible restraint, as one would use patience on a 4-year old prone to tantrums. "I am sure Miss Granger would appreciate it as well."

_Don't you dare bring me into this again. _But it was too late, for soon the condescending eyes of Tom Riddle were trained solely on Hermione for the second time in a very torturous two minutes. Blue eyes rimmed with chrome skewered her, like a poison-tipped spear shoved straight through her throat. As embarrassing as it was, she felt a few dormant hormones stir to life when an enchanting half-smile tugged at Riddle's lips, drawing her eyes to the perfectly bowed, pouty specimens. She quickly crushed them.

"Would she now?" The voice had become a sensuous murmur. Riddle's eyes didn't leave hers, but Hermione felt suddenly that she was being ogled more openly and blatantly than any of the other sex-depraved inmates had done her today. Riddle didn't spare a glance at her body, however, which was what made her sure that human attraction wasn't even close to what was on his mind. "Well, _Hayley_, would it please you if I introduced myself?" he said in the same feather-light tones – but she could hear the patronizing lilt oozing out of his voice like slime.

"It's Hermione," she said curtly. She didn't trust herself to say anything else, lest the sarcasm motor go on overkill again.

"It's _Voldemort_," Riddle replied, smile dropping. She realized that under the strange softness, he had a British accent too, and wondered at it. Riddle stared at Hermione as if he meant to threaten her, as if he meant to rip her apart with his eyes. "Charmed… Hayley."

Hermione's expression transcended into a glower, but Riddle was already back to tracing figure-eights on his jumpsuit and pretending the rest of them had ceased to exist. Her forehead puckered as she realized something. Why had he called himself Voldemort? Dumbledore called him Riddle. _This _is_ Tom Riddle, isn't it? _She glanced at the doctor questioningly but Dumbledore shook his head lightly. _Save it for later, _his eyes seemed to tell her.

She cast one more perplexed look at the top of Riddle's head, and sealed her lips.

* * *

"Voldemort is Mr. Riddle's nickname, Miss Granger. He's very adamant people call him by it – which of course means as staff that _we _should not. Complying to the…_prisoners'-" _And he said _prisoners _as if he wished for a more adequate word, but could not find one. "-demands is a sign of weakness. Here in Azkaban, you'll soon find, power is everything to these men, and very quick to succumb to change," Dumbledore told her afterward, when the session room was empty and they were putting away the chairs. "Mr. Riddle's given name is Tom Riddle Black, however."

"_Riddle_ is his middle name?" Hermione verified, trying not to make it too obvious that she was digging for information, or that she found all of this spectacularly bizarre. What sort of middle name was Riddle? It sounded like a cosmic joke.

"No," said Dumbledore, but had to stop as he strained at a stubborn fold-up chair. Hermione bent over and kicked it. "Ah, thank you, Miss Granger," he said appreciatively, beaming at her. "Now, let's see – ah, I believe his middle name is something along the lines of…Maureen…or Maurice… Marvin perhaps? Marcel?" he muttered, frowning in thought. Hermione frowned too. _Tom Marvin. Definitely not hot, _she thought, not without a sense of divine justice.

"He has two last names," she observed out loud, and hoped she wasn't being overtly interested. Of course, she only asked so many questions for the sake of Grindelwald – he had practically told her to investigate Riddle, after all. "Is he Hispanic?" He didn't seem Hispanic, with that pale skin of his, but then his hair _had_ been very dark…and soft-looking…and-

_Stop stop stop. Riddle is _not _hot, _Hermione told herself fiercely. _He is an asshole. Albeit, an extremely good-looking one..._

"Mr. Riddle is adopted." Finished, Dumbledore propped a wiry elbow on the chair cart and looked at Hermione with sudden sternness. "Miss Granger, I'm sure you don't need my reminding you that this is a correctional facility, but I'm going to do it anyway. None of the people here are stable, even if they may seem to be so." He hesitated. "Even if they may seem… er, _appealing_-"

"What? No! That's not what I- that's not why I asked- I would never even-" Hermione was so mortified she couldn't finish. At Dumbledore's skeptical look, she sighed loudly and cocked her hands on her hips. "Ok. Come on, you've got to give me more credit than that. I'm not interested in dating criminals. I have self-respect."

"Inmates," he corrected.

"Same thing."

Dumbledore tried to appear firm, but couldn't help cracking a smile at Hermione's righteousness. "Well, lovely young women such as yourself are often known for fancying – er – bad boys, Miss Granger. I just had to be safe," he said, eyes sparkling.

"Not me," Hermione muttered, although she was startled by the doctor's choice of adjective. _I like someone else, _she thought grumpily, staring at the torn toes of her faded Converses. _Someone distinctly non-jerk-ish. _Someone with adorable freckles.

Riddle didn't have any freckles.

Dumbledore, seeming satisfied with her answer, blessedly changed the subject. "Well, it is dinnertime, and I am frankly famished," he confided. "Would you like to eat in the staff lounge or the cafeteria?"

"I packed food," she said with a shrug. "I'll just eat in the filing room, get a head start on organizing." Besides, all she had brought was chips, an apple, and a soggy PB & J, which had been decimated when her laptop crushed it in the messenger bag during the ferry ride. Dinner wasn't exactly going to be an event, on any account.

"If you wish it," Dumbledore said, but he seemed unsure of leaving her alone. "I'll just get someone to stand guard while you're inside."

Again, Hermione shrugged. "Alright."

But secretly, she was relieved she wasn't going to be left on her own.

* * *

"You can cut the antics out, Twitch," said Voldemort, flipping to the next page of _the New York Times _after an annoyed glance across the table. "Shrink isn't around." _Shrink _was what they'd taken to calling Dumbledore, their own sentimental nickname for the doctor hard-pressed to wheedle them into repentance for their crimes. _It's like Dumbles is part of the crew, _Voldemort thought, an iron smile twinging his lips.

"I can't stop, i-it's turning into a habit." Twitch grimaced, running fidgety hands over his trembling legs with a theatrical shudder. All of the men at the table knew his circus act was BS though. In fact, none of them had any psychological problems – they'd been faking it since Voldemort arrived and was placed in the group therapy program, which he'd immediately decided was a fine place to keep an eye on the other imprisoned Noble Blacks' members all at once.

Voldemort shot Twitch a meaningful look, and Twitch held perfectly still. Quickly, the members around the cafeteria table caught onto the sudden tension, automatically crowding in to cut off the view of any outsiders. No one except for Voldemort met Twitch's eyes.

Their eyes were on the boss.

Voldemort folded his newspaper, setting it down. His plate of grilled filet was untouched, and a chagrining sight to all the other inmates in the cafeteria, who were eating defrosted hamburgers and tomato gruel soup. Some occasionally contemplated what might come of demanding the ill-humored pretty boy to fork over his gourmet meal plan with force. Looking at the team of lackeys that surrounded Voldemort at all times, however, the chances of demand didn't look good.

Besides, _everyone_ knew what the Noble Blacks did to those who crossed their ranks.

"Twitch," said Voldemort.

"Boss," said Twitch.

"When I tell you to do something…" He licked the inside of his teeth, straightening a fork with his pinky finger while Twitch squirmed. "What do you do?"

"I follow your orders, boss."

"Do you have any questions about that? Any confusion I need to clear up for you?"

"No, boss."

Reassured, Voldemort nodded. He looked around at his men, levelling each one with a gaze as sharp and cold as an ice sword, waiting until every one of them looked away first before he returned to Twitch, whose fists were clenching and unclenching in genuine anxiety now. "Then you listen to my orders," he said, "so I don't have to repeat myself."

They all nodded.

"I'm sure you've all heard word of the traitors in our ranks," Voldemort went on, flipping forward through his newspaper until the bold headline of KINGSLEY PUTS ANOTHER GANGSTER BEHIND BARS glared up at them. "I'm sure you're having doubts about Cygnus's capability to keep everyone in-line, to run business smoothly, but-" He laughed faintly, a whisper in his throat, a shadow of amusement that sent chills travelling fast through the rest of them. "-I'm going to set you straight right now."

"If I find out any of you have even had a secondof indecision, one passing _thought _about turning against your family…" The fork, just as suddenly in his hand, sank tong-side first into the wooden table with a hard jolt that made the entire row of them jump. The fork just grazed Twitch's fingers. Twitch exhaled shakily, staring at the four lines of red blood snaking down the side of his palm, and Voldemort continued placidly. "Then I'll kill you all. Maybe personally. Maybe not.

"But be sure of this: I will design a torture specific to your deepest fears – and have no doubt, I know precisely what you're afraid of – and that there is always someone waiting to carry out your murder, to pull the trigger, to make you pay _dearly_ for your mistakes. That someone is me. It will always be me."

Voldemort let that sink in.

Finally, his men said, in a mixture of reverence and fear, "Yes, boss."

"Very good." He stood up, shoving his unfinished plate toward the center of the table. Like a pack of hungry dogs, their eyes all fell on the simmering fish, and leapt back up to flash death threats at each other. Voldemort smiled behind them. Unfed sharks trapped in a tank with one prey to devour amongst them. "Resume your business," he said brightly.

Just before the doors of the cafeteria shut, he heard the beautiful sound of chaos breaking out, and a plastic tray cracking down on someone's head. The guards hollered warnings, charging forward with night sticks in-hand to break up the fight. Goyle had probably been the one to deal out the concussion, he always went for heads first.

The guard escorting Voldemort noticed him glance backward and shook his head incredulously. "Wonder what got their panties in a twist," he said, smirking at Voldemort, who shrugged with boredom.

"Small things have a tendency to get big quickly around here," the guard continued to observe, prodding him for some reason. Voldemort rolled his tight shoulders and nodded. "Luckily," he agreed. The guard looked at him strangely, but Voldemort's mind was already elsewhere. Cygnus always said people were only small parts of the whole, and every mob man knew the whole always comes before the individual. If pitting his own men against each other was what he had to do to single out the traitors and save the organization, then all the better for the Noble Blacks' prosperity. All the better for the whole, for the future.

In fact, all the better for himself.

* * *

**AN: Intriguing strategy there, Voldyboy. But will threats reveal all? Can Hermione stomach her soggy PB&J? And why is Dumbledore wearing PJs? What's with all these questions? What is life? What am I doing here? Why are _you _here? Who is your mother? (And is she really reallyyyy your mother?)**

**Ok I'm gonna shush.**

**Next chapter: _The Grand & Mysterious Gryff_**

**Kisses!  
ImmortalObsession  
**


	6. The Grand & Mysterious Gryff

**AN: Huge thanks to everyone who reviewed! I forgot to mention last chapter but _Fish _is a nickname for newbies in prison, it's not a plot point, just adds to the atmosphere. ;) Onward, youngins!**

* * *

"Where's the Windex?" Hermione called from where she crouched under the kitchen sink, rummaging through a jungle-like plethora of old sponges, moldy dish washer tablets, and bleach bottles.

"_What?"_ Mom yelled back.

Hermione rolled her eyes. "I SAID," she roared, "WHERE'S THE WINDEX?"

Mom yelled back something unintelligible – it sort of sounded like _I gunho, I'm notching Strife Mop!_

As she was reaching into the dark depths, Hermione's elbow smacked a sink pipe and she gasped, pulling back so quickly she accidentally capsized the bucket of cleaning solution sitting behind her on the floor. She grabbed for it, but her reflexes were seconds too late, and the bucket tipped forward, splashing lemon-scented cleaning solution all over the floor. The growing puddle of lime green stretched across the checkerboard tiles, pooling around her knees and soaking through her sweatpants in seconds. Crookshanks leapt off the toaster on the counter and agilely landed in the puddle to investigate, but finding the taste displeasing he sneezed and pranced away with his scuffed tail high in the air, off to trail Mr. Clean paw prints throughout the apartment.

"Awesome," she muttered, throwing down her towel. Cleaning Day was metaphorically impossible.

After fixing the mess, Hermione shoved all the cleaning supplies back under the sink, and stood up to scan the semi-clean apartment. It was, at least, a definite improvement from yesterday. After Azkaban she'd come home to find the place a pigsty, mobbed in dirty dishes that definitely weren't the handiwork of her mother alone, and disgusting needles that definitely _were _Mom's.

_Most teenagers go to parties or update their blogs on Friday nights, they don't sneak back home from prison, _she thought, wiping away Crookshanks' lime green paw prints with the toe of her sock as she found them. Not that _sneaking home _was even necessary. When Hermione came back last night, Mom had been fast asleep – all she ever did _was_ sleep – and Hermione was able to slip undetected into her bedroom. She went there now (it was the only utterly spotless room in the entire apartment), shutting the door behind her. Crookshanks leapt inside just in time, narrowly avoiding a tail amputation.

Dumping a pile of homework that was as thick as the width of her wrist onto her desk, Hermione sat down and cracked open her laptop to keep an eye on two e-mail accounts while she worked through the fruits of labor of AP classes. One e-mail was listed under her given name and most commonly featured an empty inbox – save for spam messages offering Jewish dating websites and discounts on Viagra – and the other account belonged to Gryffindor, filling up with up to about five requests per day in a good week.

Neither account had any new messages. She sighed, pulling over a lab from AP Chemistry to wrangle with for the next thirty minutes. In the meantime, Crookshanks weaved in and out of the space between her crossed ankles, entertaining himself by purring sweetly and rubbing his head against her leg, to try to coerce her into petting him so he could bite her.

Halfway through balancing a complicated equation, Hermione was suddenly distracted by a notification on her e-mail – her _real_ e-mail, for a change. She read the name of the sender and blinked. What did Chief Grindelwald want? Then she remembered – the Chief had mentioned holding a meeting after her first day at Azkaban, to discuss how she was…fitting in…at her new job. She opened the message. Sure enough, Grindelwald had asked her to be at the East Manhattan police station in a few hours.

An idea occurred to her. _Maybe he'll be willing to tell me more about Riddle, now that I've seen him for myself_. She'd been wracked with curiosity all last night, wondering what the young inmate had been sent to Azkaban for, and why Grindelwald seemed so interested in him. Since she wouldn't be returning to Azkaban until next week, Grindelwald was her best shot at learning more.

She grabbed her messenger bag, dumping her Taser inside too, just in case. It never hurt anyone to be early, now did it?

* * *

At the sight of a short girl with voluminous curly hair in a hoodie three sizes too big for her, declaring_ Real Girls Buy the Trenta_ in graffiti font above the pixelated picture of a dancing cartoon siren, Chief Grindelwald beheld the arrival of Hermione Granger. It was almost eerie, he thought, what a striking resemblance the girl had to the hawk-eyed detective that had worked under his jurisdiction ten years ago. She had the same shrewd dark eyes, corkscrew hair, and a smaller version of her father's button nose and mouth. The only true difference between the two was her skin, a shade lighter than glowing Barbadian brown in August, and a hair off flaxen in the wintertime. As it was fall right now, Hermione seemed to be caught in-between the colors, a lazy drip of maple syrup drooping off the bottle mouth, iced coffee and pine sap burrowed into her skin like summer's breath.

_Still, it's very easy to see which parent she takes after,_ the Chief thought with satisfaction.

"Hello Hermione," he said once she had entered his office, smiling at her across his wide glass desk and waving her into a chair. "How are you?"

She shrugged – or maybe, her sweatshirt was the one that shrugged. It was hard to defer between the two, seeing as one was so giant and the other so _not_. "I'm fine," she said. "What did you call me down for?"

"Always cutting right to the chase," Grindelwald noted, not sure whether to be impressed, amused, or offended by this. If only half the officers in the department were as focused as her...

Hermione sat down, sharply staring around his large, spacious office as he spoke. Her eyes caught on the wide window looking down on Times Square, hectic and congested with people and screaming taxis. They all looked like rushing ants from here. "By the way, I didn't _call _you," he pointed out. "That would require you using that new phone of yours."

Her eyes flashed toward him, surprised he'd realized she hadn't activated the phone he had sent her. "I can't," she said inexplicably.

"You can't what?" he asked, brow furrowing. "Use a phone?"

"No, I _can_ use one, I know how to, obviously-" She broke off, annoyed with herself, and started over significantly calmer. "Look, I just can't."

Grindelwald studied Hermione, but she was avoiding his eyes, indulging in a nervous habit of biting her nails. Finally, he said in a gentler voice, "Can you not afford it?"

A hot breath escaped her, along with one flat word. "Nope."

Sensing dangerous territory, Grindelwald thought over his words slowly before he said them. Talking to Hermione Granger, at this point, was like trying to tip-toe your way across a field of land mines on a tightrope. While blindfolded. In clown shoes. _Why is it that inner city kids always have bad tempers? _he mused to himself."What if I were to take care of it," he began tentatively, "and pay for the use of the phone as an extension of our agreement-"

Hermione's scandalized expression was enough to stop him. She seemed horrified, rather than grateful like he thought she would. _Maybe I should start expecting the opposite of what people would usually do from her._ "No," she said vehemently, balling her hands into fists on the chair armrests. "Absolutely not. You're already paying me, that's enough."

"What if it was a work phone?" he offered. "Then the department would have to cover it." When she continued to look unconvinced, Grindelwald sighed. "It's nothing extraordinary, my dear, and I do need to be able to contact you-"

"You can contact me," she said quickly. "You just did a few hours ago through my e-mail, and you called me at my school before."

Grindelwald steepled his fingers under his chin, fixing her with a stern gaze. Hermione stared back at him defiantly. _That's just how her father looked at me, _he thought with a queer sense of déja-vu. He shook it off.

"Alright, have it your way," he said abruptly, sitting back. Hermione blinked, surprised by his easy acceptance of her demand – and relieved, too? "I'll e-mail you for now, but if you change your mind, don't hesitate to tell me."

"Of course," she said.

"Well…" He drew his fingertip through a layer of dust on the office phone, examining the powdery residue with some consternation. "I initially brought you here because I want to see how your visit at Azkaban went. Did you encounter any problems there?"

"None at all."

"Good. Is there anything you'd like to talk about?"

"No, nothing." Her eyes drifted aside. She hesitated. "Actually, there…there was _one_ thing," she admitted, after a moment of expectant silence on his side.

"What was it?"

Hermione looked up, startled by his sudden intensity, and Grindelwald relaxed, reminding himself he wasn't speaking to one of his men. "Sorry," he said, flashing her a bashful grin. "I just want to make sure everything is running smoothly, my dear. Now what's on your mind?"

She fidgeted for a minute before answering. "Tom Riddle…Black." Her eyes narrowed slightly at _Black_, watching him closely for any changes, but Grindelwald was careful to obtain his neutral expression lest she assume any information she should not.

"So you did manage to scrape up some information on him?" he said, pleased by her resourcefulness.

"Yes, I spoke to him," she said, surprising him, "but it wasn't until after that I realized who he was."

"And what did you think?" he said curiously.

"He seemed…" She struggled for the right word, finally settling on, "_Quiet_."

"Well, there's a reason why he's evaded the government for so long."

"Yeah, about that." Hermione looked at him, her face rapt with burning curiosity. "What _is _he in there for? Why is it so important that he specifically stays in Azkaban?"

"It's not important that he stays in Azkaban, my dear, it's important that he stays _out _of the real world," he told her gravely. She nodded slowly. "Riddle is the sort of man who needs to be behind bars – not just for society's benefit, but for his own." He continued, "He's extremely dangerous. Unfortunately, I'm not allowed to disclose our evidence to explain to you why, as it's technically 'unofficial' and could threaten your safety. You'll just have to take an old man's word for it."

Hermione frowned. "Funny," she muttered. "I didn't get that sense when I met him."

"Did the Germans know Hitler was a sadistic egomaniac when they gave him armies and missiles, when they put the world at his disposal?" he replied with a suave shrug. "Sadly, evil often hides in plain sight."

"But what did he _do?" _she pressed.

"That's confidential," he said firmly. Seeing her deflate, he smiled a touch slyly and added, "You know, Hermione… I wouldn't be able to stop you from finding the answers to all these questions of yours on your own, if you were to say…resort to your own devices."

She cocked her head. "On my own how? Riddle isn't on the Internet, I checked-"

"The Internet–" He sighed, shaking his head mournfully. "-as much as this may come as a surprise to you, dear – it does not know everything." Turning in his chair, Grindelwald softly tapped one of the filing cabinets behind him, holding her gaze. "But some places do."

Understanding glinted in those keen brown eyes. Hermione seemed to bite back a grin, and so did he. "Alright…_Chief,"_ she said airily, standing up. "Thanks for the advice."

Grindelwald hummed. "Anytime, Hermione. Have a lovely day."

* * *

Malfoy seemed more confident than usual when he strode into the visiting room today. Voldemort took in his smarmy smirk, amused by the arrogance rolling off the capo in waves when he sat down on the opposite side of the glass and plucked up the phone. _Maybe his wife let him sleep in the bed again,_ he thought, stifling a snort. With uncharacteristic chipper, Malfoy said, "Gooood morning, boss. How're you doing?"

_I'm in prison. How do you think I am, ecstatic to see my future empire falling to shit, and thrilled to be sharing oxygen with rapists and murderers every morning? _The snarky comeback hovered on the tip of his tongue like a cuspate knife, but Voldemort didn't quite have it in him to ruin someone's mood at eight in the morning – after all, he hadn't had his morning English Breakfast tea yet.

"Dandy," he replied in a clip. "Where do we stand with the court proceedings?"

"Two weeks 'til the trial."

Voldemort snarled, slamming his fist down on the glass above Malfoy's face so hard the cheap plastic walls of the cube next to them shook and flexed. Malfoy jerked back, shocked. Nearby guards saw the episode, but looked away hastily when faced with a warning dark glare from him. "You useless moron," he said furiously. "I told you to extend the date until we got a hold of Wormtail-" At this, Malfoy's sleazy businessman smile returned with an astonishing amount of nerve, and Voldemort cut himself off, studying him with slanted grey quartz eyes. "Explain," he finally said. "Now."

"Wormtail's whereabouts were leaked by a crooked cop. We found him in a small town called Bellevue in Washington, hiding out in a cabin." Voldemort's brows arched. There was a pleasant surprise. "A couple of buttons brought him back here, and they've got him locked up in an old clothing warehouse in New Jersey at this moment, scared out of his mind, but he won't say anything about the traitor. Apparently he never met the rat in person, he was just following orders for extra cash." Voldemort rolled his eyes. "They're waiting for your orders before anything final is done though. Although I'm guessing you'd rather your only witness disappeared quietly?"

He shook his head and passed an elegantly-fingered hand over his jaw, one satisfied smile vanishing before it was ever seen. At least, this explained Malfoy's so god damn sunny mood. He said, "No, we need him. Make Wormtail agree to testify – for me. I'll write him a testimony, he'll memorize it, and he'll say exactly what he's supposed to come the trial. He's going to swear on the Bible, face the court, and prove me unguilty. He didn't see anything. He heard the details wrong. He lied to a police officer. Whatever. Bottom line is, I'm innocent."

"How the hell do we get him to do that?" Malfoy said incredulously. At his deadpan look, the capo amended, "I mean, there's flaws in that plan. What if he lies? Once he's up there, he can say whatever he wants no matter how bad we shake him up-"

"But _he_ _won't_," he interrupted, smiling. Finally, the courts had turned in his favor. And he wasn't wasting any time warping them. "He'll do exactly what I say, because that slimy little rat values his own life above anything else…and I am going to make him a very generous offer."

"You can't be serious." Malfoy was indignant. "You're going to give that lying shit a pass?" In the underground world, _a pass_ translated into a get-out-of-jail-free card. It meant Wormtail would survive this ordeal, it meant he didn't have to pay for nearly screwing the entire organization over.

"Exactly," said Voldemort. Whatever Malfoy saw in his piercing eyes seemed to be terrible, because he quickly backed off and dropped his own. "It's that or I put a price on his head, Malfoy." His handsome face brightened with an idea. "In fact, plant someone in the court room to be ready to shoot him in the head if he misses a word of his script – of course, Wormtail won't, but just do it to keep him on his toes." _For safety measures, _he thought smugly, envisioning the petrified look on Wormtail's ugly face when word of the next-in-line's orders reached him.

Malfoy hesitated. "And if he _does_ do what you say?"

Voldemort smiled. Not like Malfoy, who just looked like a greedy hustler, but like a shark with extraordinarily good teeth. "Then you shoot him in the head after the trial."

* * *

Lo and behold, national educators had devised a new brand of evil. A required brand of malicousness, worth one whopping and fundamental credit for graduation, forced on innocent children all over the tri-state area. Malign work. Nonsensical torture. And _dead_ boring, besides.

It was eighth period FACS class with Ms. Trelawney.

Why they even had FACS class at a multi-million dollar private school was a mystery to Hermione. For one thing, it was common knowledge that Hogwarts kids didn't need to know the basics of mundane living, such as how to thread needles or bake cookies or operate a sewing machine (they had housekeepers and 20-year old nannies for that). Second of all, did any human being in the 21st century need to know any of the above? Wasn't that what search engines and Youtube tutorials were for?

The school board had yet to get back to the public in regards to this argument. Stay posted for updates.

"This is the Food and Nutrition pyramid, saplings," Mrs. Trelawney announced lavishly, upon entering the FACS classroom ten minutes into the period. Everything about Mrs. Trelawney was lavish and off-balanced, from her deep vibrating voice, travelling across the room like the powerful echoes of a whopped gong, and the wild auburn hair that made her look like an overgrown Lost Boy, to the colorful bohemian jewelry dripping on her person – and then some, like the way she said _the Food and Nutrition pyramid_, so it sounded more like, _the FOOOOD and NuuuuTRITION PyrAHmid!_

For some unknown reason, she also didn't learn her students' name, but instead called all of them by variations of plant life.

The FACS teacher had a tendency to never come to class on time either, a habit rumored to be the ripple effect of a drinking-slash-pot problem, which made her frequently forget about the twelve students waiting for her three buildings away from the backseat of her hippie van in the parking lot fourth period. Apparently, she had recently had her driver's license revoked. For the second or third time.

Normally, Hermione could care less about Ms. Trelawney and her useless domestics class. FACS was a lot like gym class. As long as you showed up with deodorant on, you would get through the forty minutes of physical exercise. Sometimes you could even hide in the locker room and cram study for a test next period, or sneak out to the Irish Lit classroom for Dublin tea and Turkish Delights – or if you were feeling less ambitious, claim to a headache and take a nap in Nurse Pomfrey's office until dismissal.

Monday seemed to be the exception to this rule.

Up until Trelawney swayed into class, Harry Potter – the persistent dunce – had been pestering Hermione without mercy, via throwing balled up notes at the back of her head and hissing her name from the back of class. He'd been slaving for her attention the entire day, and she had successfully been pretending not to realize slash giving Harry icy looks. When paper ball #15 smacked her over the forehead, however, she was feeling very far away from feigned oblivion, and dangerously close to melting point. Luckily for Harry, Trelawney chose to show up at that moment.

"Alright everyone, don't get too comfortable, because you're going to be doing a little bit of moving today," Trelawney sang. She traipsed to her desk (leaving the thick, burnt scent of marijuana in her wake) and weaved through the drawers with a jingling, bangle-laden arm until she found her handy deck of index cards. Each card had a student's name on it, and it was up to Fate – and the elaborate methods of Mrs. Trelawney's Las Vegas style shuffling – to decide whose card ended up next to whose. The teacher began to read their names out loud in a grand, trumpeting voice that triumphantly hid her tipsiness.

_Lavender, Luna. Blaise, Cho. Cedric, Pansy. __Gabrielle, Angelina. Ian, Seamus. _And of course, "Last but not least," she announced, "Harry and Hermione."

The universe never played favorites, did it?

Soon all the students had gotten up to conjoin desks and start organizing their food pyramid charts. Seconds later, Harry dropped into the vacated chair next to her. For a while, they sat there awkwardly while the other students worked around them. Harry fidgeted with a lengthening fray on his repulsively bright yellow soccer shorts, unwinding it quickly. "Listen Hermione," he suddenly began, sounding cautious. "I'm sorry about what happened on Friday-"

"Which comes first?" she interrupted, hovering her pen over their worksheet. "Grains or the fruit group?"

Harry rolled his eyes. "Honestly, like anyone even cares about this-"

"I think it's grains," she pondered, writing the label in. "Then the fruits and vegetables are next to each other, right?"

"Hermione, seriously. Listen."

"Don't see why I should, but fine. I'll bite." She met his eyes, not holding back a nano of dislike laser-beaming out of her own. "What is it?"

Harry paused and glanced around them self-consciously, scratching behind his ear. Hermione bit down a scowl. _He probably doesn't want anyone to realize he's associating with the nobody, lest he endanger his _reputation. _Psh. _"About what I said Friday," he said tentatively, and her eyes narrowed. "You never let me finish," he explained. "I was never going to tell anybody about…your situation, but you said we didn't have anything in common so I thought if I-"

Hermione sighed. "I already know your parents are gone, too, Harry-"

Harry scoffed loudly, surprising her. He was pulling at the fray on his shorts more hectically now, although he didn't seem to realize it. Hermione watched the lengthening thread, wondering why it hadn't snapped yet. "Please, save me the pity party," he snorted. "God knows _everybody_ knows that– but that isn't what I was talking about." He looked at her, his green eyes cat-like and intense behind his glasses. A slice of amber in one iris distracted her for a second, before Harry broke the spell by whispering, "I'm the other scholarship student."

Hermione blinked. "You are?"

He nodded.

"But how…" she trailed. She remembered suddenly that there _were_ two scholarships offered at Hogwarts; she had simply never wondered who had gotten the other scholarship, too concerned with getting into the elite school herself. But how could it be Harry? Hadn't he been going to Hogwarts for years? Wasn't he friends with the richest kids in school? Wasn't he the soccer star, the future New York State governor? It didn't make sense.

Then she thought about it twice. Harry did have a tendency to recycle his soccer uniform, although none of the other players wore their uniforms during school on non-game days as often as he did, and he never carelessly doled out cash like money derived from an un-ending, bottomless river that lived in his pockets the way most Hogwarts students did. And who were his friends really, besides Ron and a few jocks? She had always thought his abominable fashion sense was just some ironic statement, or that he was more modest about his privilege than the others, different.

Well, he _was _different. Just not in the way she'd expected.

"Wait," she said, rearing back. "You paid me to change your grades, remember? That wasn't cheap," she pointed out. "How did you come up with money for it?"

"No, it wasn't," Harry admitted, wincing. It was the sort of wince she recognized, she'd used it plenty of times, whenever she saw something particularly enticing or lovely at the store, and then realized it was way too expensive and frivolous for her to own. "I used some of my savings to pay for it."

_Why would you do that for a test grade? _She didn't ask, but she did feel uncomfortably guilty for having charged Harry extra. In her head, she'd called it _The Hogwarts Snob Tax_ and the _Justice Tariff._ Now she winced herself. "Well, don't you have a job?" she asked.

Harry's face soured. "My uncle and aunt won't let me."

Getting the sense Harry's stand-in parents were an undesirable topic, Hermione swiftly changed the subject. "How did you find out about me?" she said. "About my…situation?"

At this, Harry relaxed, smiling a little. The thread he'd finally tore off his shorts was absentmindedly woven around his thumb, cutting off his blood circulation so the tip was almost entirely white. "It was a hunch. After you told me you were Gryffindor, I figured you weren't working a job that tough and shady – no offense – just for the heck of it, so I went on the school website to look at the student achievements list," he started, glancing at her cautiously when he said _Gryffindor. _Hermione was puzzled before remembering she'd told him not to call her that with another unwelcome spasm of shame.

_This guilt trip thing sucks, _she thought morbidly.

"I saw your name under the link for scholarship winners, next to mine." He shrugged. "It was really easy actually."

"Thank God nobody actually goes on the school website," she said, more to herself than Harry. If the students at Hogwarts had in fact cared about their academia, her and Harry's life at school might be very, very different.

"…So are we alright?" Harry asked hesitantly, after a minute.

Hermione felt even more uncomfortable than before. _Well, it would be stupid to say no now, _she thought finally, and forced herself to nod. Harry grinned, which sort of terrified her. "And can I call you Gryff again?" he pressed.

She glowered at him. "Don't push your luck."

He winked. "It'll grow on you. Give it time."

"I don't think so."

"Whatever you say, Gryff."

"Still don't like it, _Pott_."

Harry made a face. Hermione snickered and he still looked petulant, but a little gratified, too. Finally, the grand mysterious Gryffindor was starting to warm up to him. It had taken over a week, a day of the cold shoulder from Ginny, and a bruised jaw, but the wait made victory all the sweeter.

* * *

**AN: Muchos thanks for reading! Reviews get a teaser of the next chapter: _Guilt Trip._**

**Kisses!  
ImmortalObsession  
**


	7. Guilt Trip

Unkempt wildflowers and golden dandelion weeds wrestled through the abandoned Hogwarts courtyard, wet with dew leftover from a morning rain shower, and smelling of turned dirt and tree moss in the cold damp air. Hermione sat hunched over her laptop on the stone bench of the Sir Nicholas fountain. The fountain had been named respectfully after the Catholic saint, but was re-Christened _Headless Nick _when a senior prank gone wrong decapitated the priceless statue in 1973.

Amber yellow leaves matted and clumped together into sunset piles, gathered at the roots of hundred-year old oak trees and slowly creeping closer to Wi-Fi Willow. Helicopter seeds cartwheeled out of maple trees in packs each time a wind blew by – half a thousand of them would be tangled helplessly in Hermione's hair by now, had she not firmly yanked her hood up as soon as she stepped foot outside.

Harry spied her leaving the Great Hall halfway through the lunch period, absently pulling on fingerless knit gloves that let her type better, and appearing as though she very much did not want to be followed. He'd watched her vanish down a red brick trail (the presence of which he'd never before been aware of, despite having attended Hogwarts for two years), and disappearing between the sciences building and interfaith Hogwarts chapel. He had waited ten minutes before making an excuse to Ginny and Ron, and sneaking out of the Great Hall after her.

"If you're supposedly some extraordinary, infamous hacker, shouldn't you be listening to bizarre electronica music like Deadmau5 and Skrillex, _not_ Johnny Cash?"

It was funny to see Hermione yell like an enraged banshee and startle so badly she nearly fell right into the fountain water. She barely caught herself in time – saving her homework _and_ laptop – and pulled out her headphones to scowl heavily at him. "What the _hell_, Harry? Do you know how much it would've cost me to replace this?" she tiraded. "Computers don't just fall out of the sky, you know!"

Under the force of her Sphinx-like gaze, Harry wilted, and scratched the back of his neck awkwardly, briefly shamed but also elated to find someone else at Hogwarts who understood the importance of six hundred dollars. "Sorry, I wanted to see what you were doing out here," he said, sitting down on the damp stone next to her. He started to jog his feet back and forth over the blisteringly green grass. "How did you find this place anyway?"

Hermione looked down at his jittering feet, back at her laptop, and sighed. She seemed to have resigned herself to the fact she wouldn't be getting rid of him anytime soon, judging by the spasmodic twitch in her right eyelid. Harry repressed a smile of victory. "I got lost on my way to Economics class my first week here," she explained, tucking her large frizzy hair behind her ears and gazing around them slowly. "I thought I was taking a shortcut."

"My first day," he said, "I asked two seniors how to get to Biology and somehow ended up in Janitor Filch's office with the old lunch monitor, Mrs. Norris's, walkie-talkie. They stole it at the end of the last year and had been using it all summer to prank Filch with love messages. Trouble was, Mrs. Norris quit over the summer and moved to Florida with her husband to live on an orange farm." He grimaced. "Filch thought he was meeting Mrs. Norris for an 11:30 rendezvous when he found me locked in his office with her walkie-talkie in my hand."

Hermione's eyes widened. "Oh shit."

"Yeah." He twiddled his thumbs, remembering the rage on Filch's face when he found out the love of his life had been a high schooler with nothing better to do than torture a lonely 72-year old man over the summer. "He would have killed me with a mop, if Mrs. McGonagall didn't rush over after she heard the screaming. But I did get detention for three months – and after school community service."

"That's rough," Hermione said, frowning. "And you never told anyone about the seniors who tricked you?"

Harry pursed his lips thoughtfully. "Well. I did tell Ron – but he just laughed and called me an idiot."

Hermione's frown deepened.

"Hey, I was thinking about what you said yesterday," he said suddenly, straightening and facing her. At her blank stare, he elaborated, "You know…about my parents. And your dad."

At that, Hermione's uncomprehending expression was replaced by uncontrollable fidgeting and a faint indigo complexion. She swore under her breath. "Er – I – uh – don't know if I – er – should be someone you should be – um – talking to about this – eh – Harry," she started awkwardly, looking anywhere but at him. Harry's brows furrowed with confusion. "You know, Hogwarts has – ehm – a therapist, if you need to-"

He blinked. "What?" When Hermione continued to avoid his eyes, it dawned on Harry what she thought he was trying to do, and he smacked himself in the forehead. _Oh Christ_. "Look, I'm not trying to have a heart-to-heart, good God, it's just, I was thinking– How did your dad die? Because you probably already know what happened to my parents," he said quickly, and hated himself for the bitterness Hermione no doubt heard saturating his voice like acid. The bitterness he could never just manage to hide completely from a world that knew every waking second of the Potter's darkest moment.

If Hermione heard any bitterness though, she didn't say it. She just seemed relieved Harry wasn't attempting to unceremoniously unload a bucket of sentimental emotions on her – almost as relieved as _he_ felt.

"When I was eight my dad was shot trying to protect a cop during an investigation. He was a detective," she explained at Harry's quizzical look, looking up in time to catch it. She paused. "He was tracking down this guy who had been stealing people's cars by running fraud rental parking lots around Manhattan… When they found his hideout, he tried to shoot one of the cops with a pistol, and my dad jumped in the way to save him. People always think it was heroic, how he died, but-" Her voice turned strangely soft, instead of hard the way Harry's always did whenever he talked about his parents. "It was really just unfair."

_Unfair is a good word for it. _

Harry thought of the car crash his parents were blown to pieces in before he'd even known them long enough to remember their faces, his godfather Sirius telling him the collision with a tractor trailer hadn't been an accident, the police storming into their house in Arizona and dragging Sirius away in the dead of night, his neighbor Mrs. Figg sitting with him on the front porch and reassuring him with empty promises that his godfather would return to him as the cruiser drove away. A frigid social worker had introduced eleven-year old Harry to an aunt and uncle he had never heard of before, backward hicks from Utica who would hate him for reasons he would never understand, or change…

"Why did you ask me that?" Hermione asked, studying him closely. Maybe there was some strange privacy in Harry's face, mindlessly giving his thoughts away. In any case, he smiled at her, and hoped she forgot what she wasn't meant to see.

"No reason," he said easily, clasping his hands between his knees. "I just wondered."

"You're lying."

Harry glanced at her, surprised – and a little stymied. "What?"

"You're lying," Hermione repeated. She waved her hand in his face, as if dishonesty was written all over him – and maybe it was. "You looked away when you spoke, so you lied. How come?"

"It's nothing," he replied, a hardness he usually didn't use around girls snapping into the edges of his voice like deadbolts. He told himself he didn't want her to push him, but maybe he _did_ want her to – just to see what would happen next. _Wouldn't she, of all people, get it? _he thought, staring at his chapped knuckles, reddening in the dead rasp of fall and stinging him.

Then he thought, _but what if she didn't?_

Hermione raised her eyebrows at his silence. "_You _brought this up, you know," she pointed out. "Weren't your parents politicians or something?" He nodded. She heaved a sigh. "Look, if you're going to be moody and pretend you don't speak English, you can go back to that jealous harpy of yours; I'm sure she'll enjoy the cold shoulder more than me." She sniffed, "I prefer having the courtyard to myself anyways."

"Harpy." Harry smiled slowly, amused. "You mean Ginny?" Hermione nodded and he shook his head. "Ginny isn't jealous, she's just…" He struggled for the right adjective, finally settling on, "Protective."

Hermione stared at him for an immeasurable minute and Harry blinked back at her, until finally she shook her head, muttered something to the effect of boys' mental capacities, and stood up. "Come on, the bell's about to ring," she said abruptly. "My class is five minutes on foot from here." She was walking away, when Harry bounded to his feet and ran over on instinct, stopping in front of her to blurt out, "My parents were killed in a car accident, but it wasn't _by _accident."

Hermione cocked her head. "What do you mean? Like your parents were…murdered?"

_Yes! Yes! _Every vein in Harry's body told him to scream it, bellow it, but he couldn't. He had to be careful. "The car accident was planned," he said lowly, painfully aware of the vacant courtyard, of the minute hand on the clock tower nearing one o' clock, of how psychotic he sounded. "It was planned by people who didn't want my father to be re-elected as senator the year my parents died, or so I've been told." Told by Sirius, who Harry trusted with every fiber of his being. He paused, wracking his hands through his hair anxiously. "I get it, if you don't believe me. The only other person who knows is Ron and even he isn't on my side with this, which is why I usually don't..." _Say anything. _

He trailed into silence, waiting.

Hermione, seeming to snap out of a deep thought, cocked her head at Harry with a peculiar expression on her face. "Of course I believe you," she said, as if his parents' plotted murder was the most natural thing in the world. "My dad was a detective, remember? And if your parents were in politics and involved with the wrong people, well…what happened really isn't all that unexpected, Harry." Seeming to realize how harsh her words had come out (Harry had the feeling Hermione wasn't exactly the "sensitive type"), she hastily added, "Er, unfortunately."

But Harry didn't care about the insensitivities. All he cared was that someone _believed _him. Hermione Granger believed him and if she believed this, then she might believe the rest too, and someone might finally _know_ what _really _happened the night of October 31st-

"Who killed them, Harry?" They had been walking back to the Great Hall, but stopped in the middle of the hallway when she spoke. Harry faltered.

"I'm not sure," he admitted. He knew what the police said - that Sirius planned everything: the murder of his best friend, James Potter, and his wife out of deep jealousy, afterward kidnapping James' son and raising him for eleven years under a fake identity in the deserts of Arizona. The story had been raw meat for reporters, claiming headlines of newspapers and CNN broadcasting for months after _the truth _came to light. The truth had haunted Harry for years since then.

He was the infamous Boy Who Lived. And he hated it.

He stared over Hermione's head – she was pretty short, even for a girl, he distantly realized – and deeming it safe to speak freely, continued, "I had a godfather, Sirius, and after my parents died he took me in. He told me what really happened to my parents, about the murder, although I was too young to understand all the details. But I remember him saying something about this…this family."

"Family," Hermione echoed, frowning. "Like another politician's family?" Harry shook his head. She guessed, "Supporters? Um, networkers? A- a cult?"

"Yes, but no." He raked a hand through his black hair, then crossed his arms, then started to anxiously pick at a scab on his wrist. A cult…that was very close to what Sirius had told him about…but not _it_ exactly…

Then it hit him.

"_The Noble Blacks,"_ he said out loud, much to the incomprehension of Hermione, and the excitement of him. "That was what Sirius called them. It was _his _family, but he was disowned when he left them as a teenager. He didn't agree with their…values."

Exhilarated by his discovery, Harry glanced at Hermione for reassurance, but instead he found a strange expression on her face. Disappointed, Harry thought Hermione had finally figured out just how weird he was – and not in the good way. "The Noble Blacks," she repeated slowly, testing the words.

The bell rang. Doors opened and students started to pour into the halls, making it hard to hear over the sound of conversation reflecting off the dome-like, cavernous ceilings of the school. "I'll talk to you tomorrow, Harry," Hermione said, breaking out of thought. She added, "And I'll see if I can find any more information about that family, ok?"

Harry blinked in surprise, forgetting for once that he was supposed to smile. Shocked she believed him, unthinkable that she would want to _help_ him. The universe had flipped upside down and somersaulted. "Thanks, Gryff," he said, although the words weren't anywhere near sufficient.

Hermione scowled, the second-long moment ended. "Don't call me that."

* * *

The desolate shape of Azkaban Prison sharpened ahead, cold and stoic despite Bob Marley's cheerful singing, and half of Stan's bilingual conversation in Hermione's left ear. At least it wasn't raining today. At least she didn't have to live here.

The cement block buildings and towering electric fence grew closer.

Hermione thought again of her meeting with Grindelwald. The Chief hadn't told her anything she didn't already know about Riddle, but he _had _hinted she should snoop through the Azkaban filing system, hadn't he? And unless Hermione was so desperate for more information she was imagining things, what Harry told her about his dead parents earlier seemed to fit into this strange mystery, too.

Truth be told, she still didn't know what possessed Harry to confide in her. Was he always so open with strangers he'd just met? She couldn't imagine telling Dumbledore half as much about her life as Harry had told her: the planned car crash that killed his parents, his godfather Sirius mysteriously leaving a treacherous family that called themselves the Noble Blacks and plotted murders. And what ever happened to his godfather? Hadn't Harry said he lived with his uncle and aunt now? _Maybe he's just crazy, _a part of her whispered.She shook her head, clearing away questions she would have to ask later.

"Thanks for the ride, Stan. See you later," Hermione said, hopping out of the Knight Bus, and slamming the door shut after her. Stan waved her on with an absent bright smile, still rattling directions on his Bluetooth as he drove away in a hurricane of exhaust and gravel dust. The Azkaban gates closed between them.

Hermione started the long walk to the main building, the beady-eyed reds recording her every step toward the prison. She'd only been to Azkaban once before, but navigation hadn't been an issue for her since she started taking the subway alone at age eight.

Dementor met her inside the entrance, not so much as uttering a displeased grunt at her arrival before he started leading them through the hallways to security check. Clearly, pleasantries were overrated on Staten Island prisons.

As Hermione handed over her belongings for security to pick through and toed off her Converses, she studied the guards surrounding her more closely than she had the last time she was here. The faces that greeted her were haggard and suspicious, creased with years of work and unspeakable horror stories. _Or maybe I'm subconsciously referencing crime thriller movies again._ Hermione dropped her head when Dementor met her wandering eyes with his pale amphibian gaze, lacing up her returned shoes before following him through the gate.

They took a route different from before since Hermione wasn't being treated to a grand tour today, and it was now abundantly clear teenage girls should steer clear of the cell units at all costs. Hermione would've liked to say she also noticed the ominous reds watching them at every turn less, but she could only take her eyes off of them as much as the cameras could take their own scarlet eyes off of her.

"See you Thursday," Dementor said grouchily, speaking for the first time in fifteen minutes when they reached Dumbledore's office. He briskly strode away, swinging his nightstick around his wrist authoritatively. Hermione knocked on the door.

As she waited, she absently kicked the dusty air-conditioning vent next to Dumbledore's office door lightly with the scuffed toe of her Converse – her shoes were filthy, ancient things she needed to wash again, but would much rather replace with a new pair. Preferably in the shade of powder blue. A voice from behind Hermione suddenly made her jerk up from her absent-minded kicking.

"Hello Miss Granger."

Hermione made to spin around, but her shoelace snagged on the A/C vent and she had to yank her foot free first. "Oh, er, hi…Dr. Dumbledore," she said, turning around vaguely embarrassed.

"Sorry to startle you," Dumbledore replied cheerfully, waving her forward. Together, they walked in the direction of the recreation rooms. The doctor was once again wearing a pajama-esque pair of bathrobes and the sort of enchantingly outdated, pointed glasses that could easily rear back into style with the right shirt.

"You're a bit early actually," the doctor observed, and Hermione wondered how he knew the time when he never wore a watch. "But that's all good and well, you can help me set up. I'm very eager to start today's session. You see, I was speaking to a colleague of mine-" He stopped, humming while a guard swiped their passes and unlocked the door to let them in. A rack of fold-up chairs shoved against one wall of the sterile session room demanded their attention first, and one by one they started to unload and arrange the chairs in a wide-spaced circle.

As they set up, Dumbledore talked, and Hermione was surprised to find it wasn't irritating to listen to the older man go on and on, but weirdly relaxing – like listening to soothing meditation music she imagined people performed yoga to. _Sounds of the Rainforest _or _Waves Washing on the Seashore. _All of Dumbledore's background chatter simply rushed past her like white noise.

"And my colleague informed me of a new type of experimental therapy," he continued enthusiastically, struggling with a fold-up chair before Hermione bent over and kicked it. The incorrigible chair sprung open, much to Dumbledore's bemused pleasure. "Neat trick there, Miss Granger," he commended, beaming. "Well, as I was saying, the therapy is called positive psychology, and he gave it a go at a correctional facility in Cambridge with outstanding results. It's something I would love to try out here. We'll start small of course, but then big things always start small, don't they?"

Hermione agreed and he mused, "This group in particular may be a struggle, although my other groups have been successful today. Still, I think we have a fair chance at success."

"Why is this group different?" she questioned, sitting down while Dumbledore paced back and forth across the room. The inmates would start to arrive soon, session started in less than ten minutes.

Dumbledore paused and looked at her, in such a way that she was struck by the conspicuous fact – it seemed so plain now, how did she not realize it before? – that Dumbledore was overwhelmingly intelligent. Except _overwhelmingly intelligent _didn't do him justice. Staring into the doctor's eyes, Hermione felt as if she was actually staring down a long, long hallway filled with doors that could take you anywhere if you just had the key to open them.

"Because this group is unique," Dumbledore said at last, in a curious voice. It wasn't only his tone when he spoke, but the way he said the sentence that made the moment notable.

It made Hermione wonder if Dumbledore was actually speaking less of the group, and more of one particular member of it.

The inmates started to appear at that moment. Crabbe and Goyle were the first to arrive, they sat side-by-side, immovable human mountains with intricate tattoos of Chinese symbols and naked pin-up girls wrapped around their bulging, hairy forearms like delicately rendered ink ribbons. The steroid giants were followed by a hassled-looking Cuss, pacing Twitch (Hermione tried again to place Twitch's last name, Crouch, and failed), Riddle (he ignored them all), and Dolohov, who sat across from Hermione after licking his lips lasciviously at her. She promptly pulled the zipper of her hoodie up to her chin.

Making an obnoxious amount of commotion, Riddle grabbed his chair and dragged it back several feet from the circle, spinning it around until his back faced the rest of them. It seemed the only event on his agenda was counting how many dots were on the ceiling, judging by the dangerously angular tilt of his chair.

_Unique_ was definitely the word, Hermione thought with a heavy sigh.

"Hello everyone," said Dumbledore, crossing his ankles, and shining an effervescent smile upon everyone. "I hope you don't mind this too terribly, but I've decided to change up our routine a smidgen today. I wanted to start off by asking you all to consider a question: what is the worst and best thing that's happened to you today?" He paused to let his instructions sink in, while the group – excluding Riddle of course – stared back at him dubiously.

"Think about your answer," he continued, "and prepare to tell it to the person sitting across from you in detail. For instance, Mr. Carrow will be my partner." He smiled at Cuss, who swore aggressively in return, and Twitch stopped compulsively cracking his knuckles long enough to snigger loudly. Hermione glanced over at the seat across from her to find Dolohov grinning at her. She cautiously smiled back, and his unsavory grin turned malicious.

Fantastic. She was stuck with the psychopathic serial killer.

"As soon as you're ready, you may start," Dumbledore concluded.

The next twenty minutes were filled with background chatter. Dolohov yammered incessantly about all the injustices done to him in the cafeteria at lunch today, his plans of attacking several inmates via dismemberment and gutting, and never reached the optimistic point of the conversation – although he always somehow managed to discreetly inch his chair closer to hers. By the time Dolohov got to the fist fight in the dayroom, she was halfway out of her seat in an attempt to maintain distance between them, and Dolohov's malicious grin was all but breathing down her neck. Staring at his wide, lascivious mouth, Hermione saw a glimmer of gold in the back row of his teeth, which reminded her disturbingly of Mundungus. _Oh gross._

"And you, Hermione?" he drawled, prowling closer, and rolling the _r _in her name around his mouth as if licking a savory candy. Hermione stiffened. If she gave him another inch of wriggle room, she was going to be sitting on the floor. "Why don't you tell me about your day?"

"I, uh, went to school," she started, but never got to finish – _thank God _– because Dumbledore called her over for assistance at that moment. Making hasty excuses, Hermione scrambled out of Dolohov's groping range and shot over to the doctor.

"What is it?" she asked, hoping he needed her to switch partners – or evacuate the premises completely.

"I'm afraid-" said Dumbledore, so lowly Cuss couldn't hear him, and Hermione had to bend closer to. "-Mr. Riddle has upset his partner, Mr. Crouch Jr."

Had he? Lifting her head, Hermione scanned the inmates and realized Twitch had gone missing at some point during her conversation with Dolohov, while a suspiciously smug Riddle examined his immaculate nails. A guard must have removed Twitch from the room without her noticing.

"The activity isn't over, however, and I would really like for him to participate," Dumbledore went on regretfully. Hermione's eyes widened. _Oh no no no, _she thought._ Nice try, Dumbles, but there's nothing on planet earth that will make me voluntarily talk to _that _glorified frat boy. _"Could you speak with him until the end of the session? Just try to steer the conversation in a safe direction, avoid his triggers."

"'His triggers'," she repeated dumbly. "But shouldn't you be-?"

"Precisely," Dumbledore beamed, either forgetting about the second half of her sentence, or choosing not to remember it. Hermione suspected the latter. "And you'll learn the rest as you go along."

"Or die trying," she muttered.

"That's the spirit, love." The doctor patted her shoulder encouragingly.

Trudging past a confused Dolohov and toward the empty chair next to Riddle, Hermione realized this unseemly turn of events could be just what she had needed. Didn't she want to know more about Riddle, the elusive criminal who for unknown reasons had to be contained above all others? _Even if he _is_ an asshole, _she thought, remembering his condescending smile – she refused to use the adjective gorgeous again – and insistence to call her Hayley last Friday.

"Are you my new partner?" Riddle asked, watching Hermione sit down with a curl to his lip that seemed to suggest he thought she was a talking toilet bowl.

"Yes." _Unfortunately_. Hermione met Riddle's eyes shrewdly, refusing to be sucked into whatever madness the crazy man had imposed on poor Twitch before her. Riddle's eyes were choppy blue, although she could have sworn they were the color grey the last time she saw him – in fact, she was _sure_ they'd been grey. She had an infallible memory. Her brows furrowed in puzzlement.

Riddle sighed. "Look, if you could pretend not to stare at me like a lovesick buffoon, it would be much less awkward for me to sit here for the remainder of the half-hour talking to you."

Hermione blinked, and still he stared expectantly at her.

She blinked one more time.

He smiled.

_Enacting tunnel vision. _

"I _wasn't _staring at you, I was waiting for you to speak," she said forcefully, but her flaming cheeks – burning out of rage, _not_ embarrassment – probably didn't seem all that convincing to him. Riddle rolled his eyes, confirming this suspicion, and her fists clenched in the pockets of her hoodie.

"Whatever," he breathed. For the first time, he sat up and forfeited that lazy couch potato slouch of his, to reveal a shockingly long figure. Hermione's eyes caught a sliver of a tattoo under the neckline of his orange jumpsuit, reading _lu san _in loopy black script, when he leaned forward_. What language is that?_ she thought.

Realizing what she was doing, Hermione ripped her eyes off the offensive collarbone. _Stupid foreign tattoo. Stupid Riddle. Stupid distracting color-changing eyes! _

"Here," Riddle said, bringing her back to reality with a deceivingly friendly smile she didn't believe for a millisecond. "How about you talk about your day and whatnot, and I sit back and just pretend to listen." He waved a fine-boned hand at her, as if signaling she was permitted to speak, and leaned back into his seat expectantly.

Huh.

Hermione thought for a moment and folded her hands. "Well, I would have to say the lowest part of my day was this disgustingly rude guy I met," she began. Riddle, already too bored to function, stared into the middle distance. She went on, "He was so arrogant and full of himself, it was astoundingly repulsive. I mean, it explained the astronomical size of his big fat head, but _why _he was so conceited I didn't understand – not like he had anything to gloat about, as far as I could tell." She tapped her chin, contemplating, while Riddle's eyes suddenly refocused and narrowed at her infinitesimally. "As for the highlight of my day, I can't say quite yet. It will probably be getting away from the Big Fat Head." She shrugged. "But who can say for sure?"

"Cute," Riddle said, but the flutter in the corner of his jaw suggested he thought her little story otherwise. Hermione did an inner fist pump, but her victory quickly ended when he said at length, "I could almost say the same thing, except my problems exceed that of meaningless strangers I meet, who have the hair texture of a Troll Doll."

He didn't.

_He didn't._

Hermione waited for Riddle to take it back, but he didn't do that either.

_Loading ammunition. _

"A Troll Doll? Are you serious?" What was he, two years old?

"I am." Riddle scrutinized her. "Do you know the meaning of 'wash, rinse, and repeat', by any chance?"

_Fire._

"You're in prison," Hermione said painstakingly, "and you've got the nerve to criticize my hairstyle."

"That I do," he replied, unabashed. He looked at her hair pointedly, which was admittedly larger than the average, and shook his head mournfully. "Although I wouldn't put your hair and _style_ in the same sentence."

"Thanks for clarifying."

"You're welcome."

"What are you in here for anyway?" she snapped, hoping she didn't sound as curious as she really was – or as annoyed. At that, Riddle's arrogant smirk abruptly vanished, his eyes turning cold as iceboxes. In the void of conversation – which was quickly accelerating into uncomfortable – Hermione saw firsthand what Grindewald had meant when he called Riddle _dangerous_. Right then, the inmate barely looked human.

Minutes passed. An eerie chill danced down her back under Riddle's unrepetant staring. The bored, self-serving pretty boy, she now understood, was nothing but an act – except for the self-serving part – because the thing that looked at her now, like he should have fangs instead of teeth, and red eyes the color of blood - _he_ was the loose canon criminal locked inside Azkaban Prison. Hermione's expression didn't change on the outside, but her heart jackhammered when Riddle licked the inside of his top row of teeth slowly in thought.

"I'm here for the same reason you are," he said finally, and she frowned at him in confusion. Riddle leaned forward, making her automatically lean back, and slowly he whispered, _"To dine on despair and mingle with Death's cheap hookers."_

"Acting psychotic isn't going to intimidate me," she snorted, although she was secretly relieved to feel the momentary chokehold of fear vanish when Riddle laughed. _There's nothing to fear from an idiot, _she told herself, relaxing. But her brain had a mental snapshot of the dead cold glaring out of Riddle's eyes thirty seconds ago. "Not all murderers are stir crazy," she muttered.

Riddle stopped laughing. "What?"

Hermione's face twisted in puzzlement and Riddle seemed to realize something before she did. Then she understood why he wasn't smiling anymore, and she felt sick. Of course, she should've expected this…the whole _room _was probably full of them, but still to have it said out loud like that-

He had killed someone. Maybe more than someone. More than that, even.

Once Hermione thought it, she couldn't un-think it. All she could do was wonder how, why, when, where, who, how _many… _How old was Riddle anyway? Twenty-four? And he'd already upped somebody? Possibly more than one somebody? These were the sort of people her father had gotten himself killed trying to protect Hermione from – and here she was, having _come_ to a slithering den of monsters, voluntarily.

"That's why you're here," she whispered, but Riddle of course said nothing. Inexplicably, his remoteness made her all the angrier. She bent forward, hissing, "What is _wrong _with you? Why would you-? No, never mind, I don't want to know anything about your horrible, demented mind-"

"Save it, Gremlin," he interrupted, batting away her accusations like a pesky mosquito. She glared at him. "What you have to say is nothing I haven't heard before, and I'm not convicted of anything yet. I'm just waiting here until my trial, and when I'm proven innocent of all crimes, I'll be out of here faster than you can say _acquitted_."

_That's why Grindelwald is so anxious to keep him here, _Hermione thought, with the satisfaction of finally being able to piece parts of the puzzle together, and at the same time, indignity at Riddle's nonchalance. Did he really think he could just breeze in and out of prison, no questions asked?

A more terrible question asked itself. _Could_ he do that?

"Tom Riddle Black," she said, and she didn't mean to do it out loud. Annoyance flickered across Riddle's face. He corrected, "Voldemort," but she wasn't listening. More of the mystery was threading itself together, there was an outline of the truth surfacing in her mind.

_Black. _The Noble Blacks, the family Harry told her about. Was it a coincidence that Riddle shared the same last name?_ Bartemus Crouch Jr. _Didn't she read an article about Senator Crouch in National Issues last month? Didn't he have a son, who was convicted for stealing from government funds and involvement in a "nefarious criminal activity" scandal? That was Twitch_. _It had to be him.

Did their stories connect somehow?

Or was she just acting as paranoid and crazy as Harry?

None of this should have mattered to Hermione, but already it had begun to. Maybe she was finally showing signs of the very inquisitiveness that had made her father a detective. The inquisitiveness that put him in a cold ditch in the ground.

Riddle's scowl was reptilian, more an empty gesture than anything even faintly human. _He's adopted, _she remembered, _does that mean his foster family is the one that killed Harry's parents? _Questions, questions…

"Are you finished staring at me?" he snapped. "Or do you need a few more seconds so you have something to go home with?"

"Shut up," she said absently, brow creased in thought. He blinked in surprise. She said, "Do you by chance know anything about the Noble Blacks?"

Silence. Not just Riddle's silence, but the entire room. Hermione looked around and was unnerved to find every soul there staring at them, Dumbledore included. When she met his livewire gaze, Dumbledore stood and announced the end of session.

* * *

With surprising willingness, the inmates broke away from their groups to file out of the door for head count. Riddle gave Hermione an inscrutable stare before walking off, without looking back. His refusal to respond said more than words though.

Hermione was onto something. Something big.

She had stumbled onto something she shouldn't have, something secret - possibly huge in importance - and she wasn't even sure how she had done it. Now she had the pieces of a _something, _but she didn't know how to make them fit together, or even what image they would make if they did. Maybe she shouldn't try to figure this mystery out. Maybe she would anyway, just to see if she could do it. Maybe she should stop thinking so much.

Her ribs hurt from her heart beating so hard against them.

"Miss Granger," Dumbledore said when everyone had gone, making her look up. He was the picture of disapproval, his wispy white eyebrows drawn and mouth elongated by creases on the corners. The expression surprised her. Was she in trouble again? "How did you come across that name?" he demanded.

"Name? Um. What name?" she said, stepping back nervously.

Dumbledore fixed her with a clever look, but Hermione kept her lips sealed shut. She wasn't saying a word about the Noble Blacks… at least, not until she learned more. The doctor sighed heavily after a moment of expectant silence. "I believe we had an issue with you and Mr. Riddle before. If it would be more beneficial for you to change groups-"

"No!" Maybe she answered him too hastily, considering the rise and fall Dumbledore's expressive eyebrows embarked on. He reminded her of Gandalf the Grey when he did that, with slightly less bushy facial hair. "I mean, there's no issue, Dr. Dumbledore. We had a misunderstanding, he's…difficult to get along with."

Dumbledore pursed his lips. Surprisingly, it was with understanding that he said, "It's true, Mr. Riddle is – to put it delicately – one of a kind." He smiled encouragingly at her, although it was clear he was still concerned. "I'm glad you want to stay, truthfully. Your stubbornness is what people here need more of, a consistency in character. Plus, I've never seen Mr. Riddle laugh at a session before-" He sighed. "-so kudos to you."

Hermione struggled to formulate the correct response. Did Dumbledore compliment or insult her, or did he insult her and cover it up with a compliment? She frowned.

"Thanks," she said, since there wasn't much else to say, and she felt guilty for tricking him besides. "Um, I guess I'll get going to the filing room…" She was far more eager to go there now, the search into Riddle's background had become more than finding out if he'd really murdered his uncle. It was about the Noble Blacks now, too.

"If you want to start early," said Dumbledore. "Are you sure you don't want to get something from the cafeteria first? Meals are included on your visitor's pass, you know."

"That's alright, I brought," she said absently. Brought meaning a brown paper bag of a probably rotten banana and PB&J sandwich_. _But food was the last thing on her mind. As soon as they finished stacking the chairs and parted ways, Hermione was brought to the filing room by a guard, located in building three and past the dismal yard with the lonely basketball court. When she was left alone at last, she let out a sigh of relief – and remembered the reds with a jolt.

Where was the red in here?

Hermione craned her neck, scanning all four corners of the filing room and coming to a rest on the third. There the camera was, sticking out of the wall like a black skeleton arm, its scarlet eye blinking down at her tranquilly. She glanced away from the red, in case anyone on the other side of the camera decided to take an interest in her. If she acted normally, she could get away with this. Plus, it was her _job _to look through the prisoner's files. She was supposed to organize them and type them into the Azkaban virtual database. It was another part of the prison's new renovation plan.

All she had to do was spend the entirety of her sixty minutes here trying to hunt down Riddle's file.

But there were hundreds of files to go through, all of which were piled in unordered stacks of boxes lining the walls. Hermione hadn't even gotten to the computer part of her task yet. Worse, she'd only managed to put a dent in one cardboard box of files on Friday.

_No time like the present, _she thought to herself, and tore through the first box her hands fell on.

* * *

Hermione Granger was a spy.

But she wasn't old enough to work for the FBI, and she couldn't possibly be a member of the Three Brothers.

So who was she? Why did she know so much about him?

_She knew about Morfin, _Voldemort thought, lying on the cot in his cell and staring into the dark. A cold sweat had come over him in the middle of a bad dream, turning his skin into a tacky-like wax. Lights out was three hours ago. _She knew about the family._

Maybe she was a reporter.

Voldemort thought, if he smoked, then this would be the perfect time for a cigarette. But he did not – he made it a point not to, in fact, in order to separate himself from the mindless addicts and junkies that poured money into his pockets every time the family business enabled them to kill themselves. He hated cigarettes viciously.

Granger didn't seem like the type of girl who smoked.

He rubbed his jaw, barely growing a mist of dark stubble, and wished for the vintage shaving kit sitting on his bathroom counter back at home. His hair grew back faster when he used the cheap razors they had here. He also wished for his contacts, he was blind as a damn bat without them.

Damn Wormtail for sacking him here, the useless rat. His fist clenched around an invisible neck in the air.

In his head, Voldemort ran over the progress report Malfoy had given him that morning. Wormtail was practicing his prescribed testimony every day, in front of an audience of button men and a trusted capo, Lestrange. Senator Fudge had happily obliged to their requests to have him stash the 300 keys of heroin in Thailand on his private plane when he heard the price Voldemort was offering. The senator had successfully flown in the supplies, hidden in boxes of cargo customs thought was food and medicine supply for earthquake victims, and the Noble Blacks' shipment would soon be picked up by Malfoy personally. Malfoy was going to store all the heroin at a remote warehouse with the help of several handymen, then transfer it to another discreet location once the scrap men left, until only Voldemort and Malfoy would know of the stash's true location. Afterward, the loot would be carved up and dealt out accordingly.

Everything was running considerably well for the Noble Blacks, but Voldemort's _everything _was getting smaller every day – especially since he was cooped up in this hellhole. The fervor of loyalty in the Noble Blacks' ranks was at an all-time low of the century – physical threats weren't enough anymore, his men wanted results, too. He could hardly blame them for it.

Twelve more days until trial.

Seventy-eight more, until his crowning.

* * *

**AN: As always, thanks for reading! Your faithful tomione worship is solemnly appreciated. **

**Kisses!****ImmortalObsession**


	8. Bada-Bing, Bada-Boom

_Tom Marvolo Riddle Black_

_Date of Birth:_ _12/31/90_

_Height: 6'3 ½_

_Weight: 153 lbs._

_Eye color: blue_

_Hair color: black_

_Ethnicity: Caucasian_

_Personality type: annoying, arrogant, and extremely snobby_

That was how Riddle's file began – save for the last part, which was Hermione's personal contribution and entirely accurate. The prisoner file she'd found in the Azkaban filing room on Tuesday night was clear as crystal in her mind's eye. If she closed her eyes, she could see the row of dark green folders in a dust-caked cardboard box marked _B _in faded block print behind them, singling itself out of the hundreds of other boxes just like it, as if appearing to her by the divine will of a higher deity. Her inner eye traced the curves of Riddle's feathery signature on the contract agreeing his lawyer Malfoy would represent him in court, black pen and written hastily, fast enough for the ink to barely sink into the fibers of the page.

She had quickly skimped over the unnecessary basics when she found his report – physical features, high school diploma, a printed copy of his _very_ full passport, et cetera – and scoured through until finally finding Riddle's legal papers, which had told her everything from his court date and official alibi to what he was being charged for – and even what detective arrested him. But the included description of the crime scene Riddle was found at was what unlocked a cold horror inside Hermione.

Riddle shot his disabled uncle in the head in cold blood. No known motive had been listed, although he claimed to have acted on self-defense after his uncle stabbed him with a knife, and the evidence of said murder weapon with his blood on it and a shallow wound stood in his defense.

But the story had lots of holes in it.

First of all, little to no concrete evidence surrounded the entire fiasco. _One_ _person_, a private driver who had brought Riddle to the scene of crime named Peter Pettigrew, was the only eye witness. Coincidentally, he had disappeared entirely since Riddle's arrest. After what Riddle did to his uncle, Hermione didn't doubt the driver was dead or worse. She had tried to find out more about the ordeal by going to the New York Public Library after school and researching various names from Riddle's file on the Internet, but his story seemed to be nothing more than smoke and mirrors…

Everything about Riddle led to a dead end, from his background to the driver who vanished after betraying him to the police. At least, Hermione had learned Riddle's foster dad was a man called Cygnus Black. He was a highly successful entrepreneur, known for making huge donations to the Rescue Dog charity ball every year (or so Google said), and he owned several small general stores throughout Manhattan.

Did Cygnus Black have a history with politics? she wondered.

* * *

Hermione was fiddling with new updates for _MalgitX_ and muttering strange computer gab under her breath when Harry finally stumbled into the abandoned Hogwarts courtyard on Wednesday afternoon, messy hair windblown and poking around his head like black thistles. Before lunch, she'd told him to meet her at the fountain as soon as possible, and she was cruelly amused by the thought of what pains Harry must have to go through every time he needed to escape his controlling girlfriend Ginny to meet her.

She was beginning to worry whether he'd been successful in slipping away at all, when she looked up and saw Harry half-running half-falling through wet piles of amber and orange maple leaves that had accumulated overnight during the rainstorm toward her. By the time he was standing in front of her, he had rivulets of mud streaking his tan legs and sneakers, but he still managed to smile at her brilliantly.

"Hey," he said, not seeming to realize his glasses were falling off, and bouncing on the balls of his feet like an enthusiastic Golden Retriever. Hermione almost reached out to fix his askew glasses, but caught herself, covering the motion by pretending to fix a crooked lasso of her rambunctious hair.

"Hey yourself." She scooted over to make room, although the fountain was big enough for twenty-four Harrys and Hermiones, but Harry didn't sit. He rolled up his sleeves and jogged in place, cheeks puffing with strained gasps. At her inquisitive look, he explained, "Big game today, I'm restless. You want to come?"

"I can't, I have Gryffindor work," she said, surprised and secretly pleased he'd invited her. Harry shrugged, his brown muscled legs kicking him higher into the air every time he switched feet. She shook her head. "Quit hopping around like a rabbit for a minute, I have to talk to you. About your parents. And that…family. Well, sort of."

Harry stopped, or most of him did. His spiky black hair was dripping with sweat (he must have run out here) and he fiddled with it as he talked, as if trying to hide his curiosity behind his bangs. "Oh really? What did you find out?" he said absently.

"Well." She paused, estimating how much of the truth she should cut out, and how much of that truth she should tell him. "I don't know for sure, but I think I found the family you were talking about. The Noble Blacks."

He stared at her. "Are you serious?"

She made a _so-so _gesture with her hand.

"Tell me what you know," Harry commanded, falling on the water-stained stone bench next to her and leaning in. The wind scraped by, hurling a whirl of helicopter seeds and damp leaves their way, and they shielded their faces from the autumn stew until it passed. Hermione could smell Harry's sweat on the air, he smelled like grass and boy.

Wiping sticky russet pine needles off her jeans, she said, "Don't take any of this to heart, Harry, I'm warning you I'm not sure about any of it. All I have are…theories. Not even theories. They're more like theory outlines."

He waved her uncertainties off, unconcerned. "Yeah, I got it, theory outlines, nothing in the world is certain, blah blah blah. Now shoot."

Hermione gave him a sharp look. Harry amended, "Please."

"Well, I did some research into the family you told me about, but the only thing I found that could possibly connect is this guy: Cygnus Black. Have you ever heard of him?" Harry shook his head. "He's a philanthropist, very rich, lives near Central Park, but he's got lots of other homes all over the world," she continued, weaving her fingers together. "He doesn't have a job really, he inherited most of his money, although he owns a shopping strip on Hogsmeade Ave in Upper Manhattan. Now I'm thinking he could be related to your godfather Sirius Black, but I haven't had time to run to the library and check records of the family trees…"

"I can do it," Harry said, without her having to ask. She nodded.

"If they're related," she went on, "then we know we're on the right track."

"The right track." Some emotion flickered across Harry's face, disappearing too fast for Hermione to decipher it. His brow furrowed. "The right track to what?" he asked.

Hermione looked down. Her fingers unconsciously traced the thin veins of a helicopter seed that had caught in her hair during the breeze, she played with it for a while before speaking again. "I don't know," she admitted. "I'm not sure why any of this matters to you so much, why or if the Noble Blacks matter at all, but I want to help. I have a feeling that-" Here she turned faded red above her scarf and avoided his eyes, compulsively cracking her knuckles to draw attention away from her face. "-that I'm supposed to do this. Like everything connects - your parents, Sirius, that family he belonged to, Cygnus Black–" _Riddle._ "-and we have to figure out how." She ripped the helicopter seed clean down the middle, holding the broken halves together until the wind teased the pieces out of her hands.

"I feel the same," Harry said eventually. Hermione looked at him, eyebrows arcing in surprise. He laughed at her expression. "What? Who doesn't like a good mystery, Nancy Drew?"

Hermione's mouth flattened. "I think I liked Gryff better."

"Look, I'll go to the library before the game tonight and see what I can find. Are you free after six? Meet me on the outside of Central Park, a quarter after by the hotdog stands," he said, quickly formulating a plan. As she watched him, however, Harry's dark eyebrows slowly drew together. "But what if Cygnus and Sirius aren't related?" he said. "Black is a common last name."

"Then we look somewhere else," she said, and the fire in her voice surprised her and Harry both.

"And if they _are _related, what then?"

"Then we have a lead." She cracked her knuckles, Harry flinched. "And there's one more person who I think might be connected to this – if Cygnus is the Black we're looking for, that is – so I have a hunch about where to go on from here. But first, we should find out if the Noble Blacks actually are the family you're looking for, Harry."

Maybe Grindelwald would know about the Noble Blacks, she thought. The Chief might even be willing to let her look through some old records at the police station, and she could see if any relevant articles or files related to the Noble Blacks turned up. Grindelwald had wanted to have another check-in meeting with her at the end of the week anyway, she could ask him then.

"Sirius always called them a family," Harry murmured, intently picking at his leg hair. Hermione studied him with a frown. "What sort of a family organizes people's murders?" she said, voicing the question the both of them were thinking.

They stared at each other. Suddenly, Harry bound to his feet, struck by inspiration he curled up one side of his lips, and said in the worst Italian accent imaginable, "_Today I settled all family business, so don't tell me you're innocent, Carlo."_

"Um…" Hermione studied him uncertainly. "Are you high?"

Harry scowled, offended. "No! I'm quoting _The Godfather."_

"The what?"

"_The Godfather." _Harry stared at her, in such a way it was clear he thought Hermione's IQ score was in sincere jeopardy. "You know, the movie."

"I've never seen that movie."

He looked horrified.

Hermione rolled her eyes impatiently. "Oh, get over it. What are you talking about?"

Still wounded but coping, he said, "For God's sake, please tell me you at least know what the movie is _about_."

"Well duh, I don't live under a rock," she said in annoyance, crossing her arms. "It's about the mafia and all that underground crime hooha – _oh_."

"See?" he gloated. At her failure to share his enthusiasm, however, Harry's mood speedily dampened. "Work with me," he pressed, giving her shoulders a sharp shake. Hermione glared at him until he let go. "_Today I settled all _family _business. _Don't you get it? The Noble Blacks are a mob family, they commit crime and larceny under the radar, they control the city behind the scenes, _they_ _organize murders_."

"You're basing all this off a movie quote?" she asked.

Harry's eyes narrowed.

"Ok, ok," Hermione conceited, lifting her hands in surrender. Harry waited while she turned over the odds in her head. What he said _was _possible, it was just that it was also…far-fetched. She found herself having a hard time picturing Riddle in a pin-striped suit with a machine gun in his hand. What was worse, she found it entirely too easy to be distracted by the possibility of what Riddle _would _look like in a pin-striped suit.

Ugh. Dumb hormones.

"It explains why they're all related," Harry added, but she shushed him, still thinking. After another minute had passed, she said at last, "We'll add 'being a mob family' to the List of Theories."

"We have a list?" he said, puzzled.

"Yes, we do." Picking up her messenger bag, Hermione set one foot in the direction of Economics class, and glanced over her shoulder back at Harry, who was doing warm-ups again. "6:15, Central Park," she verified.

"Hotdog stand," Harry said solemnly.

"See you."

He saluted her. _"Arrivederci."_

* * *

"So Mr. Riddle-"

"Voldemort."

"So Mr. Riddle," Dumbledore repeated, ignoring the acid glare shot from across the room at him with comfortable ease. Voldemort sighed inwardly and retracted his gaze to study the popcorn ceiling through slatted grey eyes, all seventy-five and a half inches of him stretched out on the faded plaid sofa opposite Dumbledore's desk. He felt as though he was lying on a fluffy cotton cloud. Contradictorily, he wanted to magically summon a knife and stab that plaid cloud into a hundred thousand pieces, right before he plunged said knife into Dumbledore's serene face.

"I received your former psychologist's notes yesterday evening. It's been a long time since you've seen anyone, hasn't it?" Dumbledore pulled the notes out of a folder on his desk. Voldemort idly wondered what the doctor would do if he grabbed those papers and ceremoniously dropped them into a shredder.

He hated therapy.

His silver eyes fell on Dumbledore's office door, as if he could see the guard standing watch on the opposite side of it, ensuring he remained here for the next thirty-five minutes, and did not attack Dumbledore during his time.

_Bloody Wormtail. _

"Your psychologist from Wool's Orphanage seemed to believe that you are anti-social and bipolar, but I disagree with his diagnosis," Dumbledore continued. He shifted forward, folding his hands between an Obama bobble head and the gigantic brass cage standing on his disorderly desk, holding a huge colorful bird inside that resembled an ugly crossbreed between a peacock and the thing from _Up._ Dumbledore called said ugly thing Fawkes. "You have no disorder or mental afflictions, although I was first inclined to believe you might have Narcissistic Personality Disorder – but your lack of a promiscuous history quickly cancelled that theory."

"I promise you, doctor," Voldemort interjected, stretching his arms behind him languidly. "I can be _very _promiscuous."

As if Voldemort hadn't spoken, Dumbledore went on, "Perhaps you harbor harsh feelings toward the abandonment of your biological parents, which is not unordinary for someone in a position like yours, and can explain a surprising amount of your unique personality traits."

_A position like mine. _As if Dumbledore could ever fathom all of the power entrusted to Voldemort's more than capable hands. His lip curled. "Does it now, Dumbles?" he asked softly, returning his gaze to the ceiling.

"Yes, but the past is nothing you can't overcome through your own willpower – something I am confident you are not lacking," Dumbledore muttered as an afterthought, shuffling through more mysterious notes. "That being said, you _do_ show some of the personality traits of a narcissist, but not all of them. You're very clever and an excellent manipulator, but I see no signs of stunted emotional growth or a precocious development of promiscuity in your history, and your character seems very genuine to me. Perhaps there's more, something I'm not seeing here." He twirled a strand of his Merlin-esque beard thoughtfully, studying him. "You prove to be full of contradictions, Mr. Riddle."

"I prove to be many things" came Voldemort's airy reply. "Including but not limited to devastatingly handsome and extremely charismatic."

Dumbledore leaned back in his swivel chair and folded his hands over his stomach. _He's probably psychoanalyzing me or fantasizing about what new cheap pajama set he can buy with his next paycheck, _Voldemort thought with an outward sneer_. _Everything about the doctor irritated him, from his extremely fluffy eyebrows to the intense way he held eye contact, as if gazing was a challenge – which, naturally, made Voldemort never want to back down first.

"Is appearance very important to you?" the doctor asked.

"Do you enjoy having the interior decorating skills of a blind grandmother?" He gazed around Dumbledore's office, stroking his recently-shaved jaw in contemplation. "Because your office décor speaks volumes, dear Albus. You should look into _feng_ _shui_."

"You think so?" Dumbledore glanced around his office with a new eye, wispy brows dipping thoughtfully. "I always thought it very homey in here."

"You could do with some green life and windows."

"Yes, natural sunlight is excellent for the health," he allowed, scratching his beard. "Excellent deflecting, Mr. Riddle," he added, as if appraising a pupil. Voldemort went silent at that.

In fact, he didn't say another word for the rest of their blasted appointment. Dumbledore didn't seem to realize his coldness, the rambling buffoon. The old man talked at him incessantly during the gap, telling countless stories about other patients, and comparing the differing intensity of taste between candies Voldemort had never heard of, like _Bert's Every Flavor Jelly Beans, _and common ones, such as _Jellybelly. _He was luckily able to tune the inane doctor out eventually, with such success he fell asleep somewhere in between an analysis of Fudge Flies versus candied mosquitos. Later, he woke up feeling better than he had since coming to Azkaban – the couch _was_ a fluff cloud – to find Dumbledore feeding Fawkes and the session fifteen minutes past over.

Voldemort left with the guard outside, suspiciously wondering why Dumbledore never woke him up and made him leave. However, his nerves smarted like shorted electric plugs at one word Dr. Dumbledore had said to him, sticking to his dreams like foul cigarette smoke.

_Abandonment._

* * *

Walking along the flushed flower trails and towering oak trees framing Central Park, Harry told Hermione every waking detail of how the Hogwarts Founders had won today's game against the Brooklyn Badgers, 12-0. All the while, Hermione couldn't stop glancing at Harry's mouth, which had a hint of pink smeared on it she was pretty sure wasn't ketchup from the hamburger he bought off the food truck on Fifth Avenue.

The mental image of Ginny giving Harry her version of a victory gift after the game made her nearly gag on her chicken gyro.

_Ew. Bad mental images._

By the time they finished eating and talking about nothing in particular, Central Park was far larger and deeper than it had seemed the hour before, washed in a filmy midnight blue that transformed the hundred-year old trees scattered throughout the park into mysterious silhouettes, and turned lurking rats hiding beneath the playgrounds into scampering shadows. Daylight savings was weeks away, but New York had already started to turn night-dark around five, and the vast park in result cleared out faster than normal, as hoods as well as rodents came out of hiding…

As they walked around the shadowy blue outskirts, Hermione glanced up at the twinkling skyscrapers and thought of the summer sun with longing.

"I looked up Sirius's family tree at the library," Harry said eventually, kicking what was left of his third hamburger toward an obese pigeon that scuttled away in fear, then came back and pounced the beef like a cannibalistic vulture. He used his nail to pick a tomato seed out of his canine, continuing thoughtfully, "Cygnus Black was Sirius's dad. He had a brother too. Sirius, I mean."

"'Was'?" Hermione repeated curiously.

Harry waited a long time before answering. Usually, summer was the season that made people spill every dark secret they had to bear into the open night, when the oppressive heat and vibrations of lighted fireflies rustling in the maple trees dug under skin and gave them head rush, a need to dump everything in their soul on the person conveniently standing next to them. Tonight, fall seemed to suit Hermione and Harry's confessions just fine however, creeping dead leaves over the sidewalk, and wilting flowers in the blotted twilight.

Hermione noticed a man in a baseball cap sitting on a bench, reading a paperback. Harry kicked a soda can on the sidewalk back and forth between his feet expertly, flipping it into the air with his toe before he swept it aside into the far foliage with a well-aimed kick.

"Well?" she pushed, growing impatient.

Harry looked up, blinking his long dark eyelashes in surprise. "Sirius died," he said blankly, as if surprised he'd forgotten he hadn't told her that already. "In prison."

Hermione's eyes widened. "_Prison?_ Wait- but- but I thought you said you used to _live_ with him."

"For a little while." He smiled tightly, the gesture didn't reach his eyes. "After my parents died, we lived together for years in Arizona. When I was eleven, the police knocked on our door and arrested Sirius. They said he was guilty of the indirect murder of James and Lily Potter. They'd been looking for him for eleven years, and somehow they found us that one day. We were celebrating my birthday, we'd made one of those box cakes and everything. We were about to go to the beach in Ocean City for a road trip."

He stopped and she stopped a step after he did. People were forced to walk around them, grumbling and bumping shoulders while Harry's cheeks hollowed out as he inhaled slowly, the chapped fingers of one long hand digging through his pointed hair. All he wore was his soccer uniform despite the fact it was forty degrees and only getting colder, Hermione realized, but he seemed to be indifferent to the cold or ignoring it.

"I think Sirius was framed by his…ex-family. The Noble Blacks. You know what I mean." He shook his head. "He always said he'd had issues with his relatives – now I know why," he added darkly.

"How did he die?" she said cautiously.

Harry shrugged. "Not sure." He glanced at her, something fierce flashed behind his green eyes. "I just know what I think happened to him."

"You think someone killed him." Not a question.

He laughed humorlessly, and he didn't sound like school Harry at all, who smiled hard enough to illuminate light bulbs and shouted Hermione's name across the Great Hall whenever he saw her. She frowned at him.

"Does it matter?" he asked, in such a way the question shot down any answers. "My godfather died for a crime he never committed. My aunt and uncle weren't happy to take me in, but they were next on my parents' will and they needed the money so they had to. My aunt Petunia is a prejudice bigot and always hated my mom for marrying a Democrat, and suddenly she and her husband _and_ her spoiled kid hated my guts – but it's not them that bugs me. It's-" He broke off and met her eyes with wide-spaced, green amber ones, burning behind his fogged glasses, showing a secret side of Harry Hermione – maybe, _no one _had ever witnessed before.

Staring, she wondered how she ever thought Harry Potter was just another Hogwarts boy.

"They didn't let me go to his funeral," he said, voice strained with a secret kept for too long. "If they knew what I was doing now…" he trailed, looking away and kicking the sidewalk gently. The breeze ruffled his black hair into crow feathers. Hermione didn't know what to say. _I'm sorry your uncle and aunt are total tools?_

She kept her mouth shut.

"I want to know what happened to him, for sure. And to my parents," Harry said with quiet intensity. "No, I-I _need_ to know. I'm the only person who gives a damn."

"I'd say I understand, but I don't," Hermione admitted, wincing. The only people she had ever lost were her Jewish grandpa (who she'd only met once before at her cousin's bar mitzvah, and was far too grouchy to stand anyone but himself and beer) and her dad. And she'd known from day one exactly how he died. But if his death had been shrouded in lies and mystery, would _she _want to know the truth behind it?

She didn't have to think twice about the answer.

"At least we know Cygnus and Sirius are linked," she said, in an effort to bring Harry's former, happier self back. "We know who the Noble Blacks are."

"Do we?" he said colorlessly.

"Yes." Hermione took his hand – it was freezing, she could feel that through her gloves – and squeezed it. She dropped it awkwardly when he blinked in surprise – for a second, he looked like his normal self again – and stuck her hands in her hoodie pockets. She needed to find out what Mom had done with her winter coat. Maybe she sold it to one of Mundungus's creepy friends; it wouldn't be the first time Mom auctioned off Hermione's possessions for a quick fix.

"One more thing," Hermione said, increasing her pace, and smiling with closed lips. "Cygnus Black has an adopted son. His name is Tom Riddle Black, but he calls himself-" She paused for effect. "-_Voldemort_."

"Vol-de-morsh?" Harry repeated blankly. "What is that, a weird anagram?"

She paused. "Um… Maybe." Focusing, she waved Harry's confusion off, and continued, "Listen, the point is Riddle's been accused of murder and he's in prison right now. Azkaban Prison on Staten Island."

Harry looked at her, astonished. "That close?" His features erupted into blinding fervency. "We have to see him! We can go after school and ask him questions and-" Seeing her hesitant expression, he broke off. "What?"

Hermione scratched the back of her neck. "Tom Riddle won't answer questions," she said uneasily. "He's not even admitting to any crime."

"How do you know that?" he questioned, eyes narrowing slowly in suspicion at the knowledge Hermione knew something he didn't. Which she in fact did.

"Er…I met him." At Harry's bemused look, she elaborated, "I kind of volunteer at Azkaban sometimes."

"_Why?"_

"Well…I may or may not have been arrested for illegally downloading the new Muse album last week, and the Manhattan police chief may or may not have agreed to waive my charges if I spy on Riddle for him at a prison, because Riddle killed his uncle and is an extreme threat if he gets released – I don't know why though, aside from the murder thing, but I think it's got to do with the Noble Blacks," she said all in a rush.

It all sounded infinitely cooler and more bewildering out loud.

Harry stared at her, slowly shaking his head. "You get weirder every day, you know that, right?" he said.

"Thank you," she sniffed, determined to take _weird _as a compliment.

"Alright," said Harry, steepling his fingers under his chin like a strategizing movie villain. "If Riddle is Cygnus Black's son, then he'd be part of the mob family too, right? Right," he said, answering his own question, and ignoring Hermione's eye roll at _mob family._ "So that means...that means…" Harry looked at her for help, lost, but Hermione didn't know any more than he did. This was the part she herself hadn't gotten to yet.

"I'm not sure," she confessed. "Maybe I can get him to tell us something?"

"I doubt he'll agree to that. You just said he wouldn't answer questions."

"I know," she said, deflating. Harry didn't even know the half of it. Riddle was the A-list boy for blistering attitude and arrogance – and Hermione despised every unfairly gorgeous inch of him.

"No offense, Gryff, but why are _you _doing this?" At Hermione's perplexed look, Harry explained, "I mean I know you're smart, but you're still just a teenage girl. Couldn't the police just – I don't know – get a CIA agent to spy on Riddle or something?"

"That's what I thought at first." She shrugged. "But the police chief, Grindelwald, knew my dad and recognized me when I was brought into the station, so he…did me a favor."

"Really?" he said skeptically.

"Well." She blinked. "Yeah."

"And you didn't consider the fact that your dad might be connected to this…mystery, too?" Harry suggested, looking sly. Hermione raised two pointy eyebrows at him. "Think about it, Gryff," he said excitedly. "The police chief knew your dad and after _all this time _on the _same exact day _you get arrested, he suddenly decides, 'Gee, it would be a great idea for Hermione – this teenage girl I barely know, by the way – to spy on some guy from the mafia for me! She could always just join the city clean-up crew, but why not send her to a prison?'"

"It was a spur of the moment thing," Hermione said defensively. "And he didn't _decide_ anything, he was offering me an out. Otherwise I would've been arrested."

"Yeah, you and thousands of other people who download music every day, and rarely get caught for it," Harry muttered under his breath.

Crossing her arms and annoyed far more than she would admit, Hermione snapped, "Just shut up! That's not what happened. And we never agreed that the Noble Blacks are part of the mafia!"

"Au contraire, they _are _the mafia. I'm sure of it." Harry was irritatingly confident. "Besides, what are the odds Detective Granger's daughter just happened to be the one girl out of thousands of no good downloaders in New York who got busted for pirating?"

Harry had a point. Hermione was grudgingly impressed by his rationalizing - and irritated she hadn't figured any of this out on her own earlier. "But why would Grindelwald arrest me on purpose?" she asked, bewildered.

"I don't know," he admitted. "But I don't think it's illogical to guess your dad has something to do with it…and the Noble Blacks."

"No way," she said firmly. Dad? In the mafia? _Puhlease. _"My dad would never have anything to do with – with _the mob _– _if _that's what they are," she said incredulously."Really, Harry, you're talking crazy now."

"Just ask Grindelwald about it," he urged. At her reluctance, he wheedled, "It can't hurt to ask. If he says you weren't chosen on purpose, you can leave the whole thing alone and forget about it. But you should try at least."

She should try. Try to what, see clues that weren't there? Reopen old wounds to dump salt into them? To mix up the past until it was unrecognizable, a glob of lies and mystery...

Hermione didn't want to do any of that, in fact she had no intention to. But she nodded anyway, if just to placate Harry. He smiled and thunked her on the shoulder with his fist – the gesture would've been alright if he didn't hit her so hard – jogging off with a waved goodbye when a taxi pulled up to the curb beside them at his whistle.

As Hermione took the subway back to Queens, she sorted all the theories out in her head, until she had three to consider.

1) Three people in Harry's family had been killed by the Noble Blacks. Possibly.

2) The Noble Blacks were a crime family, which Riddle was a part of – possibly, a big part of – and that was why the police wanted her to watch him.

3) Without doubt, Grindelwald wanted Riddle to stay in prison – because of the murder? Because of the Noble Blacks? – at all costs, and he wanted Hermione, for some reason, to ensure this.

And maybe, _maybe, _Hermione's dad had had a connection with the Noble Blacks once upon a time. Maybe Harry's parents weren't the only ones who died of unnatural causes.

She didn't know.

The tram stopped on Times Square, 42nd street. Hermione doubled up her scarf, stood up, and walked to the East Manhattan police station with more than one question for the Chief on her mind – and plenty of reason to get her answers.

* * *

**AN: Thanks for reading! Review for a quick teaser of the next chapter: _Can of Worms_ (which yes, contains Riddle/Hermione fun, which will be increasing in multitude in the very near future). Eep! **

**Kisses!  
ImmortalObsession**


	9. Can of Worms

**AN: Hellooooo lovelies! I am dead tired. Summer film program, art homework, and screenwriting til 1AM take a toll on a chica. I think my brain has turned to pretty, gooey mush.**

**That being said, now realizing I probably should've said this earlier, not everything in this AU is loyal to the HP universe. So if you notice some things that don't match up to canon, I already know - I just wanted to change it, so I did. Example: Cygnus is married to Druella in the series. Here, he's married to Kate Black.**

**HUMUNGO thank you to everyone who reviewed and is sticking with this story! It's a slow-burn, but things are picking up more and more with every chapter, I promise... ;) **

* * *

Voldemort had been wide awake for hours by the time wake-up call crackled out of the half broken intercom in the hallway outside of his cell, spurting commands for inmates to move into place for room checks and head count. Azkaban's renovation plan had yet to reach this end of the prison, explaining why Voldemort's was the only functioning toilet in cell unit B, and the cement wall next to his head was covered in suicide notes and drawings of butchered stick figures dating back to 1942.

Absently, he rubbed the faint angry red lines circling his bare wrists, gifts from the handcuffs he was condemned to wear whenever he left the confines of his cell. A tiny word in ink scrawled across his left wrist, small and delicate as an obsidian-colored vein.

**_respetto_**

On the wall next to his foot, he studied a crudely rendered doodle of a unisex stick being devoured by an alligator with flames erupting out of its eye sockets.

"INMATE," a guard passing through the unit shouted, rapping on the bars sharply with her nightstick. He looked up, although he made sure to indulge in a leisure yawn and carefully pop the kinks out of his neck first. "What is it?" he asked confusedly, as if unfamiliar with the technicalities of morning rounds.

The guard scowled at him, staring around the barren state of his cell with a displeased curl to her thick lip. "This cell's a disgusting mess, inmate. I'll have you know I run a tight ship in unit B, and you've got _standards_ to meet," she said loudly, facing him. As she did, she quickly pulled aside the collar of her buttoned shirt, out of view of any other prisoners or patrolling guards. His eyebrows rose, but then he saw the edge of an envelope hidden by her undershirt. _Ah._

"Get cleaning, inmate, or I'll strip your privileges next time," she sneered, tossing him the envelope through the bars before moving onto the next cell. Voldemort waited until she had left the floor before he picked up the envelope lying on the floor, curiosity burning inside him like a stroked match. He went back to his cot, facing away from the cell bars, and flicked open the seal.

_Kate._

He stared at her girlish lavender-colored stationary, the swirling pen loops of her expert hand for a while before finally rolling his eyes and snorting to himself. Kate had always taken her role as his stand-in mother far too seriously to do anyone good, but it seemed that for the first time, she'd done something useful for the both of them. Her letter explained all the familial affairs he had missed during his past two months at Azkaban – and more, clues she suspected would lead them to the Noble Blacks traitor. Just in case of spies, she would send a confidential over with her true tips later today, and simply write in the weaker points in the letter.

Never let it be said that Kate wasn't an ingenious mob wife.

Cygnus had gone in for chemo again, and although the boss of the Noble Blacks was weak and even more hairless than before, he had enough verve to still be pissed at Voldemort. _That's nothing new, _he thought, smirking as he read.

His foster brother Regulus was in Saratoga again, making bets on the horse races and tracking the statistics of their gambling pools. Ennie missed him. Kate wanted to start a winter sport this year, and she also hinted at her frivolous desire for him to find a _mouse:_ family slang for girlfriend. Voldemort scoffed when he read it - it wasn't like he hadn't heard thatone a thousand and one times – but he paused on the last note Kate had written him.

_One-third of what your father ordered has gone missing. Who exactly did you send to pick up the delivery, Tom? _

He read the line again, twice, but the words didn't change.

_One-third. Missing_.

All the air had suddenly been sucked out of him. He sucked in air between his teeth and swore, loudly and fantastically.

Voldemort's blood had gone ice-cold, goosebumps pimpled over his arms like snowflakes in a freak blizzard. Outside of the automatic twinge of annoyance he felt at Kate's insistence to use his given name, he was shaken by this astronomical mistake – not _his _mistake, of course… But someone else.

_One-third of what your father ordered has gone missing. _

100 keys of heroin, gone like smoke into the wind. Poof. Abracadabra.

Under his orders, Senator Fudge had flown the shipment into Washington DC airport approximately two days ago, under pretense of replenishing "empty" medical supply boxes for the earthquake in Thailand last week. That left plenty of time for someone to transfer the heroin two times over – once to a warehouse and then to a discreet location no one save for him and Malfoy knew about – but perhaps the shipment had been relocated by someone once more, to try to screw _him _over. Obviously, it wasn't the damn senator. Fudge had gotten his payoff and more, and politicians didn't like to leave tracks.

_The traitor then? _Voldemort would've liked to think finding the rat turning the Noble Blacks inside out could be half so easy, but only an idiot would be stupid enough to try to steal fifteen percent of his money flat, and someone who managed to turn so many of the Noble Blacks' members into blood traitors - and land Voldemort in prison to boot – simply couldn't be this_ stupid_.

So that left him with two options. Either whoever picked up the delivery – and he knew exactly who had – was the traitor, trying to pick apart the Noble Blacks bone by little bone from the inside…or the thief was working _for _the traitor.

_Looking forward to seeing you again, darling._

_All my love,  
Madre_

Voldemort carefully penned out any important lines in Kate's letter with the black Sharpie hidden in his pillowcase before he ripped it up. He would drop different parts of the message in trash cans spread across Azkaban when a guard came to bring him to the cafeteria for lunch later. He would weigh the odds of this epic betrayal carefully before he did anything decidedly vicious.

The slyest snakes didn't go to their prey, after all. Their prey came to _them_.

* * *

"Is Chief Grindelwald here?"

Hermione stood in the main entrance of the East Manhattan police station, attempting to speak to an emergency operator with a huge weave, huger attitude, and even bigger silver hoops. She had burst into the station without warning mere minutes ago; she would've gone straight to Grindelwald's office, if a security guard hadn't intercepted her at the coffee machine and sent her back here.

Very inconvenient.

"Chief is busy," the operator replied, glancing up at her for the first time and frowning heavily. She chewed a wad of bubblegum obnoxiously enough to make Hermione's hands twitch at her sides.

"But is he _present?" _she stressed, trying to sound polite instead of aggravated. She didn't succeed, judging by the offended lift of the operator's pert nose.

"Yeah, he _present, _but he _busy, _like I said," the woman snapped back. Her phone rang and she held up a French-nailed fingertip at Hermione, pushing down the button for the line and spinning around to face the computer monitor as she spoke rapid fire into her headset. Behind her back, Hermione mimicked the operator's excessive gum chewing and sassy ways.

Turning around, she quickly searched the room for a head of tousled silver hair or a charcoal pin-stripe suit. She saw neither.

When the operator finally turned back around, she asked her if she had an appointment.

"I'm his niece," Hermione said offhandedly, figuring it couldn't hurt to go along with the lie Grindelwald had fabricated earlier to reach her at school. "I'll just go see if he's there – and you don't have to take me, I already know where his office is." Pretending not to hear the operator's protests, she grabbed a peppermint from the bowl on her desk and walked away. The operator would have gone after her, had her phone not exploded with three more emergency callers at that very moment.

Hermione strode across the department floor, ducking behind a tall fake urn in order to sneak past the heavyset security guard who'd caught her before (luckily, he was standing at a vending machine, preoccupied by an attractive Latina officer deciding on a candy bar). She slipped into the office section of the building unnoticed, careful to avoid direct eye contact with anyone as she hurried through the halls to Grindelwald's office. Once she reached it, she pounded on the door impatiently with both fists, until it shook back and forth under the force of her blows, and was finally yanked open.

"_What the hell do you think you're doing?"_ the Chief thundered, before he looked down and saw the short teenage girl standing on the opposite side of his office door. Hermione raised her hand in a wave. "Hermione- What are you doing here?" said Grindelwald, nonplussed and significantly less terrifying. His denim blue eyes narrowed over the shiny wrinkled scar on his cheek. "Did something happen at Azkaban?"

"Er…you could say that." She nodded behind him, slipping her hands into the pockets of her hoodie to hide their fidgeting. "Can I come in?"

"Yes, of course," he said, ushering her inside readily. "Come along, my dear, sit down. Now…what happened?" He sat down across from her at his vast glass desk, sprinkled with knickknacks and photos of what Hermione assumed were his wife and grandchildren. He folded his hands, studying her intently.

"Well, this doesn't really have to do with Azkaban or Riddle," she admitted, fidgeting with her hands. He frowned. "Or maybe it does, I don't know… that's why I'm asking you. To find out."

"Ah."

Grindelwald sat back, seeming resigned. _Does he already know what I'm going to say? _Hermione thought, surprised. "To find out what, my dear? I hope," he went on meaningfully, "you're not going to ask me for information you know I can't give you."

"Why am I spying on Riddle?" she blurted out. Before he could reply, she quickly said, "And don't tell me I'm not spying, because you and I both know that's exactly what I'm doing – I just don't understand why _I _am doing it."

"As I said before," Grindelwald began, haltingly, "I knew your father-"

"But you two weren't close," she challenged.

Kneading his silvery goatee, he pursed his lips and nodded, allowing that. "No, we weren't. We were only colleagues."

"So when you offered me the proposal to work at Azkaban, you weren't really looking out for me," she finished. A tiny morsel of her, she distantly realized, was disappointed Grindelwald's help hadn't been genuine - although she would never admit that out loud. "So if you weren't helping me, what _were _you doing?" she asked suspiciously.

The Chief frowned. "Hermione," he said sharply, fixing her with a stern gaze. "I'm afraid you've got it all wrong. I _was_ looking out for you – I have been for many years, and I am right now. The reason I have chosen you to observe – er, _Riddle_ is less than innocent, it's true, but secretly I've been hoping since I met you those few weeks ago that we would soon have the very conversation we're having right now," he told her. "Because it all comes down to your father."

"My father? How?"

"As you know, Detective Granger worked for me here ten years ago," he said. "He was transferred from the Queens department and spoken of very highly by his supervisor there. He had excellent credentials, I was sure he could take on anything we threw at him – and he did. He solved and closed cases faster than there were new ones to give him at times. He just…he had a…a _knack _for finding things out, and piecing them together to find answers. He was like a bloodhound tracking a scent when it came to his cases– but that's beside the point. You see, there was one case especially, one your father took such a deep interest in…and I could never understand why, until-" He paused. "-well, until he passed away, actually."

_Murdered, _Hermione thought, _he means until he was murdered. _For some reason, people were always afraid to say the word, as if skirting around murder made Dad's death seem less gruesome somehow. But it didn't. If anything, it made it seem worse. Taboo. A shameful secret. "Was it the case with that car thief?" she guessed, not quite so interested in the Chief's story anymore. She already knew how it ended.

"No, that case was years and years before this," Grindelwald said dismissively.

Dumbfounded, Hermione's mouth opened, but he went on, "This case had to do with a school construction scandal. Your father technically solved it, as far as our records go, but he had disagreed with me in this regard. He believed there was something bigger at work behind the bad construction, something the people running the school knew about but were too – let's say, _intimidated _to make any official statements on.

"The construction company that worked for the school was one of many, who all came from an interconnected network of small obscure companies, none of which were listed or legalized, as we would later found out. This network also threatened the school into hiring them, year after year, or else school board members would supposedly disappear." He sighed, absently tightening his tie, and Hermione waited anxiously for him to continue. "Since Granger – your father, I mean – couldn't get anyone to press charges, much less to testify, he had to drop the whole investigation – frankly, we didn't have the funds or the time for him to pursue trails that led to dead ends – but behind my back, I now know, he never did drop the case."

"Hold on," Hermione said suddenly. Grindelwald looked up. She had her knuckles shoved against the corner of her mouth, and her eyes seemed more piercing than usual as they randomly focused on a photo of the his two blonde grandchildren in concentration. "Who was the school afraid of? What was this big network thingy majig?" she asked.

Grindelwald raised a brow at _thingy majig, _but said, "That is the million-dollar question, my dear." He spread his hands. "Since your father's secret case remains open today."

Hermione frowned. "And what did my dad do…after he pretended to drop the case?"

Grindelwald shrugged, but his suppressed grin was decidedly boyish. "He went against my instruction," he said, almost fondly. "Granger was a stubborn man, a lot like you – no, no, don't take that as an insult, my dear; it's an excellent trait – and he did what he wanted the way he wanted to, even if that meant jeopardizing himself. I'm very sorry to say this is why he ended up the way he did." He hesitated. "And the story behind his death, as you know it, is far from the truth, I'm also ashamed to say. It was invented to protect your family – you and your mother – and this very department. I will only tell it to you if you want me to, Hermione, because I don't want to hurt you."

Hermione raised two eyebrows at Grindelwald. All that, and he thought she might _not _want to know? And what the hell did he mean the car thief story was made up? How did Dad die? Did Mom know? No, she couldn't know about this, Hermione decided. And if Mom found out the story of her husband's death they'd been told all those years ago was nothing but a cover-up – a lie – for a far darker tale, then there was no telling what she would do…

To herself, that is.

Hermione decided suddenly that whatever had happened to her father, however terrible or brutal or devastating, she couldn't tell Mom about any of it – no matter how much she might want to later. For some people, the past needed to stay where it had been so carefully filed away.

It was too painful to put anywhere else.

But she still had to know.

"What really happened?" she said warily.

"Detective Granger investigated an Italian crime syndicate." Grindelwald looked past her, seeming far away. "He discovered many gruesome findings, findings no honorable man could've known if he hadn't gotten in the case as deep as your father did. The people threatening the school, as it turned out, were loansharks collecting protection payments for an infamous mob organization."

"Protection? Protection from what?" Hermione said, although she had an eerie premonition she already knew where his story was headed. Half of her wanted badly to tell Grindelwald to stop, but she dug her nails into her palms and waited instead.

"Protection from the people who were behind these companies," he answered. "Granger had suspects, but nothing concrete enough to hold up in a courtroom. He was on the verge of a breakthrough, he'd told me the last time I saw him. We were in the break room and I was telling him about a new case of mine concerning a local kidnapper, when he brought it up…

"We've always known crime families still exist in New York, you see, but we're unable to pay much attention to them – what with more pressing issues like counterterrorism and the city's security – 9/11 truly changed the entire game, my dear – but your father thought he'd found a serious crime family right here in Manhattan, supplying local high schools with smuggled drugs and running a number of illegal activities throughout the Northeast: gambling, drug dealing, larceny. The list goes on forever. He said he'd been on their trail for a good six months. I wasn't surprised – that sort of thing isn't exactly unheard of in big cities, although most people like to pretend otherwise – but I was worried about Granger. Nobody got mixed up in this sort of business and came back out in one piece.

"Despite my warnings, Granger pursued his case. Now I'm not saying I was right and he was wrong to do what he did, but somehow someone inside that mob family he was investigating must have realized what he was up to, because I didn't hear from Granger for three days. I filed a missing person report as soon as I could, but no one saw any signs of him. He'd simply disappeared out of thin air." He snapped his fingers. "Like smoke."

"On the third day, a report of an awful garbage smell from a neighborhood in Brooklyn was made," he continued heavily, "and a dispatched sanitation crew found a body in the trunk of a parked car, riddled with nine bullet wounds."

_Dad. _Hermione's eyes lowered. It took a moment before she could speak again. When she did, all she said was, "It was the mob family." Not a question.

An answer.

_The Noble Blacks killed him, _she thought, nails curling into the leather chair under her, hard enough to rip it._ Just like they killed Harry's parents._

Grindelwald studied her, his expression gentle enough to make Hermione's stomach wrench. "There's not much I can disclose to you without breaking the agreements of our confidentiality policy," he said, "but because you are a relative, the rules can be bent a little, I think. I actually have something for you." He moved back in his swivel chair and bent down, rooting through filing cabinets while Hermione watched him, puzzled.

"What's that?" she asked, on seeing the half-disintegrated manila folder he held out to her. It looked like a home for dead things.

"Your father's case files," Grindelwald said. He waited until Hermione carefully took the folder from his hands, expecting an uncanny shock to travel up her arms and fingertips when she touched it, or for an image of her father's dark smiling face to flash into her mind. She had nothing left of him except a few photographs, since Mom had sold all of his possessions for money years ago.

But the folder in her hands was only just that. Paper.

Or maybe not. Past the disappointment welling in her throat, she realized Dad's old case files might be a tangible piece of the puzzle she had suddenly ended up in the smack middle of. But when she reached out to open it, her fingers froze, and her heart thundered in her ears like the wheels of a subway as it roared across the underground city grid. She tasted blood and realized she'd accidentally bit her lip.

"You can read them if you want, they're very interesting," said Grindelwald, typing the password into his laptop. Out of the corner of her eye, Hermione saw where his fingers hit the keys. "They have his notes, his speculations on aspects of the case-"

"Why are you giving me this?" she said flatly.

Grindelwald stopped typing, looking around the screen to peer at her. He had a pair of reading glasses on and appeared to be able to tell how bone tired she was simply by glancing at her. He said, "Your father and I were only acquaintances, Hermione," he admitted, voice low. "I know, in your mind, it makes no obvious sense why I picked you to 'watch' Riddle for me. But I know you're smart, Hermione. Very smart. Smart enough to get into the state's best private school on full scholarship. Smart enough to take care of your mother-"

"My mom? What do you know about my mom?" she demanded, straightening. The defensiveness in her voice took Grindelwald by surprise, he blinked at her, confused. "Nothing, dear." He frowned. Hermione did not relax. "Look, you're a smart girl, Hermione. You don't need me to tell you that," he said abruptly, leaning forward, tone intense. "You deserve to know what really happened to your father – which I have just told you – and to use that knowledge to your advantage."

_He can't be saying what I think he's saying… Can he?_ Grindelwald was telling her she should solve the case, the case that got Dad killed and tore her family apart, and all but killed Mom in her sleep. He was telling her to help him bring down a major crime family – or at least, to help in part. He was telling her to figure out the mystery, to make all the puzzle pieces connect.

Everything connected, starting with those case files.

"I've gotta go," she said abruptly. Before Grindelwald could say anything in reply, she had stumbled out of the door, taking the case files, and a thousand too many thoughts with her.

* * *

As Voldemort walked into the session room, he found most of the group was already inside and waiting for him. Crabbe and Goyle were sitting side-by-side again (outside of Azkaban, they were called the Terrible Twins for numerous reasons, and a package deal for whoever hired them), and Dolohov, Twitch, Dumbledore, and the volunteer Granger were all present. The chair next to Granger was free and he took it, smirking when she stiffened as he sat down. For reasons he couldn't fathom, he got under Granger's skin a lot deeper than any of the others did.

Alright, so maybe he _could _fathom a reason or two. He did compare the girl to a Gremlin last session, didn't he?

Cuss arrived shortly after Voldemort, muttering profanities under his breath on the way to the last empty seat and shaking from withdrawal. Granger watched him with an unfathomable expression as he sat down. Dumbledore said, "Welcome back everyone. We're going to pick up where we left off last time, and start by stating what you each found better about your day today. Mr. Crabbe, you may go first."

About here, Voldemort tuned out, and let his thoughts wander where they may. By the time the statements came full circle, Granger was finishing a spiel about a test grade or something equally uninteresting, and Dumbledore had an expectant, patient smile waiting for him.

Shrinks.

Voldemort looked up thoughtfully, lacing his fingers in his lap as he considered a response. Finally he said, "Because I am required to be here, where there was a slim chance of enjoyment in my day, there is now none." Twitch snorted in agreement, while the other prisoners chittered and dissolved into sardonic laughter. Dumbledore quickly reclaimed their attention, however, much to his annoyance. Granger never made a sound.

He glanced out of the corner of his eye at the girl, wondering what her sudden vow of silence was for. If it had been last session, she would've been up in arms by now, and he had been hoping to find out just how much she knew about him since her claims to know about his charges and the Noble Blacks. He wanted to know what she knew, and whether she could potentially become problematic for him. It was even possible she worked for the traitor.

But he couldn't get his answers if she wasn't _speaking_.

"You're quiet today," he said softly enough for Dolohov, sitting on his other side, not to hear anything above a murmur, although Dumbledore's sharp look toward them showed he wasn't fooled. He ignored them both. "How come?" he asked, looking at Granger sideways, who pretended not to hear. A grin edged his mouth. Challenges were always more fun. "Boy trouble again, Chaka Kun?"

_Ah, there she is._ Granger's teeth sawed back and forth, and just as quietly, she hissed back, "Nope. Just your conceited, pompous ass." And she said something a little more incriminating than would a famous funk singer.

"Watch the language, please."

She didn't answer, save for a choice digit. He rolled his eyes.

There wasn't another chance to talk, as Dumbledore chose to split them into three-person groups at that moment – the man loved group activities more than Jelly Belly, it seemed – and Granger was sent to the opposite side of the room with Crabbe and Goyle, walking away from him all too eagerly. Voldemort bit back his irritation, standing to join Cuss and Dolohov. Granger would have to be cornered later.

Too soon however, session ended, and he still didn't know any more about Granger than he had before. She and Dumbledore stayed behind in the room to clean up. Reluctantly, Voldemort filed with the other inmates into the hallway, lingering at the back of the line in hopes of catching some of the shrink and volunteer's conversation. He didn't hear anything more engrossing than the outline of Dumbledore's next lesson plan, and three absent "uh-huh"s on Granger's end before the door closed. He waited for them to reemerge from the classroom during head count, brain working furiously.

Voldemort's intuition was never wrong, and he had a _feeling _about Granger. A bad feeling, a lot like the crawl he'd felt slither down his spine the first time one of the Noble Blacks' members was arrested by Detective Kingsley. _What if Granger is working for _him?he thought suddenly. The prospect hadn't occurred to him before, but it would partially explain how Kingsley kept finding out about the family operations, and why Granger was so nosy.

He continued to stay in the back of line and didn't move as the other inmates walked away, nodding at the guard who shot him a questioning look. The guard nodded back and turned around, pretending not to notice anything amiss. Azkaban was under his thumb, lock and key.

Voldemort slid back out of the range of a red, hiding behind a column until Dumbledore and Granger came out. Ten minutes later, they did, speaking casually as they meandered down the hallway.

"Today fared much better than last week, Miss Granger," Dumbledore was saying approvingly when they exited the door. "Your interactions with everyone are excellent."

Granger frowned. "Almost everyone," she corrected.

Dumbledore hesitated, while Voldemort strained to hear more, as the two became farther away from him. "Yes, but that's expected. Riddle is more difficult than the others." At this, Voldemort snorted under his breath. Difficult? They hadn't seen an iota of _difficult _yet…

"Why is that?" Granger asked casually. As casually, in fact, as _he_ would have if he wanted to dig up dirt on the enemy.

"I do not discuss my patients in that aspect," Dumbledore said sternly, instantly shutting her down. Voldemort smirked at the shock on Granger's face. _Not as smooth as you thought you were, are you, Gremlin? _he thought at her smugly. "It goes against the confidentiality code-"

"Of course," she said, turning slightly red. "I didn't mean it like that though. I was wondering about his case, I mean…" Her voice lowered. "I know what he was charged with."

"You do?" Dumbledore asked, before his ridiculously wispy eyebrows rose in a clarified manner, and he answered his own question. "Ah, I see. You came across his file, while you were organizing."

Granger seemed embarrassed to be caught in the act, but only minutely. Voldemort wondered what Dumbledore meant by "organizing", and how Granger had gotten her grubby little hands on his file. What else did she do around here? "I glanced at it," she admitted. Her voice lowered, Voldemort could barely hear her. "Do you think he really did it though? Killed his uncle?"

They were almost to the end of the hallway now. He craned his neck to listen, watching their shadows elongate and fade as the distance between the three of them increased. He barely heard the doctor reply, "I can't say. We'll have to wait for the trial, just like everyone else…"

That was the last he heard. Voldemort stood there alone in the shadows, breathing in the harsh scent of antiseptics, and running over their conversation in his head. Granger was more inquisitive than he'd anticipated, but everything she had said was more or less inconsequential. The only thing about her that really bothered him was the fact she was asking about him at all.

How should he deal with her? Was there anything to deal with at all?

Even if there wasn't, he couldn't afford to be gullible with a traitor on the loose. He had already been blindsided once, he wouldn't allow himself to be fooled again…

And if he let Granger ask him whatever questions were ticking under that extraterrestrial hair of hers, then he could find out exactly what she was after – without revealing anything important, of course – and decide what to do with her then. After all, he doubted Granger could tell the difference between a lie and a bulldozer. Deceiving her into trusting him would be tricky, but nothing he couldn't manage in time.

Crushing her would be delightfully easy.

* * *

The night ferry back to New York smelled like the girl's bathroom at Hufflepuff High – definitely not a good scent, or without piss and ladylike unpleasantries. Hermione slept for most of the trip, startled awake by the foghorn blasting across the water as they pulled into port and docked. She disembarked and walked slowly to the subway, shaking off the last clingy remnants of sleep and stretching her arms above her head with a shiver. It got colder every night, as winter inched closer to her wicked throne and chased the fall back into fox holes.

Distantly, Hermione realized that she was starting to develop a peculiar routine. Wake up, go to Hogwarts, analyze the Noble Blacks family with Harry, do homework, go to Azkaban, try to wring information about Riddle out of Dumbledore (most of the time without success, unfortunately), and go home and lie in bed wondering what all the bits and pieces meant despite the fact she was dead tired and should have been sleeping.

Harry did almost the exact same thing, except he had soccer instead of a volunteer job at a prison, and a jealous girlfriend instead of a moody cat. He'd also decided they needed to go to Hogsmeade Square this weekend for investigation after Hermione related what Grindelwald told her about her dad to him. Although, she still hadn't read the case files yet.

She was scared to.

In Hermione's mind, reading Dad's case files was akin to opening a big, ugly can of worms, or using a Ouija board. It was suicidal and dangerously stupid. Why would she voluntarily do something that would probably get her killed?

_For the same reason Dad did, _she thought, answering her own question and watching the lights in the subway tunnel flash by the smudged windows. _For the thrill of solving a puzzle no one else can figure out. _Suddenly, it made much more sense why she liked Geometry so much.

Hermione walked the rest of the way home, stopping in a bodega to pick up groceries and a pint of ice cream. She took a plastic spork from the salad bar and devoured the ice cream outside, tossing the empty carton in a trash can the next block over. "Delicious but not nutritious," she muttered to herself, picking up her spoils again, which she probably should've had the cashier double bag in circumspect. She stopped at a crosswalk, vacant save for a passing mail truck and a man in a baseball cap waiting to cross.

_Hold_ _on_.

Hermione glanced at the man again, and two things in her brain simultaneously clicked into place. She recognized the stranger, although she didn't know where from. Unease whispered up the back of her neck. She glanced over the street they stood on. Empty.

_No witnesses._

Without waiting for the light to change, she cut off the mail truck on the road and jogged across the street, trying to look as casual as possible. As if she wasn't rushing to get home. As if she didn't realize she had a stalker who was following her.

Three more blocks until her street. She forced herself to keep an even pace, resisting the overwhelming urge to look behind her, or break into a dead sprint. Why was someone following her? Who was it? Oh hell, if she turned into one of those Lifetime horror stories, she was going to be _so _pissed.

Suddenly, the handle of one of the cheap plastic bags snapped, and boxes of mac and cheese, milk, nonperishables, and a package of tampons went tumbling a few feet into an alley. Hermione swore, debating between abandoning her stuff – even if it did cost $14.61 – or grabbing it fast enough for the creepy guy not to catch up, so she could eat something besides ice cream for dinner. A soup can of chicken noodle rolled away from her, the _Campbell's _label gently tapping the side of a dingy blue dumpster.

_Tick-tock, tick-tock… _

Fast as light, Hermione snatched her stuff, but when she straightened her vigilant eye caught a shadow moving ten feet away from her. Toward her.

Except it wasn't a shadow.

It was a person.

_I need to get the hell out of here. _Hermione concentrated on moving naturally, getting to her feet, and walking away with her arms full of food and feminine products as her heart throbbed somewhere around her tonsils. She listened intently to the whisper-quiet footsteps tracking behind her, focused on the corner ahead of her. That was her street. As soon as she got to the corner, there would be enough distance between her and the creeper for her to run like hell, and if he caught up to her, she would hurl soup cans at his head until he backed off, or – preferably – fell and got a concussion.

She turned the corner. Without hesitating, she took off as soon as she was out of the man's view, running faster than she ever had in P.E. class, than she ever had before, and prepared to scream murder if two burly arms suddenly wrapped around her from behind-

_Almost there. Five more steps. _

She tossed a glance over her shoulder without seeing what was there, long jumping over the steps to her apartment and slamming her key into the lock. Her hands shook so hard it took four tries to get it to go in and twist, and she glanced over her shoulder again and again, waiting for the man to appear and launch down the stairs after her. Finally, the door unlocked, she kicked half the groceries ahead of her and raced inside, shoving the door behind her hard enough to make the walls tremble.

Hermione collapsed against the door gasping, sliding the deadbolt home and turning around once she was brave enough, to peer out of the looking glass. She felt Crookshanks' fluffed tail wind around her knee like a soft vine as she scanned the entrance outside for an intruder. But there was no one in sight.

God. The _one _time she didn't bring her Taser.

Her bipolar cat had wrapped himself around her leg like a knee sock and was purring fastidiously. Hermione picked him up and crushed him to her, burying her face in his tangled fur – Crooks never let her brush him – and setting him back down before he could twist around to bite her. In the living room, Mom was dead to the world, strung out on the couch like a popcorn garland someone forgot to take down after Christmas. Hermione wanted to tell her she thought she had a stalker, but at the same time she felt too guilty for leaving her mother home alone so often to wake her up.

She studied her quivering hands – sand brown in the dim light, with stubby, earth fingers – and curled them into fists. It was high time she looked at Dad's case files, because whether she liked it or not, a can of worms had already opened itself on her doorstep.

No one could close it again, but her.

* * *

**AN: Thanks for reading. Leave a review if you're feeling kind (or any emotion. Yeah, any emotion. So unless you're a zombie, leave _madre _some sugah). *creepy eyebrow wriggle***

**Kisses!  
ImmortalObsession  
**


	10. A Friendly Warning

The Three Tithes, it should be noted, is an excellent place for tasks of all nature, such as but not limited to debunking notorious crime syndicates, meeting antisocial clientele with questionable criminal records and peculiar digital requests, and buying overpriced lattes, all at the same hole-in-the-wall. Harry entered the slightly dingy cybercafé at 3:00 after soccer practice to find Hermione sitting in her usual spot in the back corner of the hangout, glued to her laptop like a bee to honey, and waiting for her cup of chai tea to cool off as she dawdled. She looked up when she heard him sink into the dull red leather chair across from her, a sharp frown contorting her already uncommonly severe features at the sight of him.

"At long last, the elusive Harry Potter bestows his celestial presence upon me," she said in less-than-sincere (if not snarky) greeting, although Harry was five minutes early, and she'd told him she didn't have to leave for Azkaban until four. "I was beginning to think you fell into the subway tracks," she added, blithely sipping her chai. Froths of hot steam curled around her snub nose, blurring out the constellation of freckles there and creating the second-long illusion her dark eyes were luminous as light bulbs for a heartbeat. Then she put down her chai, and her eyes were normal brown again.

"Thanks for your heartwarming concern for my well-being," he said sarcastically, although possibly a beat too late. Pretending to be annoyed but clearly enjoying the banter, Hermione rolled her eyes and closed her laptop, twisting in her seat to root around in her messenger bag, which she had slung across the back of it, until she had found a beat-up manila folder that looked like it had spent the better part of its lifespan under a couch, and thrusting it at him.

"My dad's old case files," she explained at his questioning look, gesturing impatiently for him to open the possibly moldy folder. He did, though not without reluctance. "I stayed up all last night reading them all," she said, as he picked curiously through the papers inside. Some were laminated legal documents of deeds and construction permits, others handwritten notes reread so frequently the creases where they had been folded and opened were worn tissue-soft.

He could imagine with surprising ease, Hermione poring over these case files deep into the hours of night and morning, her curly hair even more wild and frizzed than usual from being repeatedly pushed out of her face, and her father's old notes scattered around her like a hoarder's nest of information, she pondering every nuance and possibility. Then on second thought, Hermione was probably far too organized for inconvenient nests of notes to be lying around her bedroom for perusing in stock piles, and had typed all of her theories on Detective Granger's case files into her laptop days ago for practicality.

"Everything Grindelwald said was true," Real Hermione was saying excitedly, when Harry dragged his eyes away from the case files to look back up at her. "The messed up construction at that high school, the shady businesses, threats, loansharks… and there's more." She lowered her voice, so he had to lean in to hear her over the background noise of the café. "All of the findings lead back to one source," she said in hush. "Guess who."

"The Noble Blacks." She nodded. He glanced down at the files in his hands – no, not just files. _Answers_. Real, concrete _proof _all of his suspicions for the past six years were more than him hanging onto the past, that their speculations weren't ludicrous but based on actual _fact_. He wasn't crazy. He wasn't conjuring wild theories and magical, far-fetched stories to cushion the blow of his parents' premature death. He was right.

He was _right._

"I know this school. Raven Claw Prep," he said suddenly, and Hermione jerked around the folder to see what he was talking about. Her brow furrowed as she read the article he already had. "My cousin Dudley goes there, but-" He snorted. "-he's a complete pothead." Dudley was also one hundred and fifty pounds overweight, and preferred his fists to his vocabulary, which was limited to _pussy _and _skinnylittlemotherfucker._ Aunt Petunia adored him, which explained a lot about his mental state.

"He is?" Hermione asked, with more eagerness than Harry had thought the fact his douchebag cousin was a pothead could spur. "Here, look at this," she commanded and opened a packet within the folder, flipping through the pages of highlighted notes and marked print-outs until she found what she was looking for. She indicated a note scrawled in chicken scratch in the margin of a newspaper clipping. "_Long list of suspensions, mainly because of drug dealings, smoking on campus, etc. Drug supply coming from the gang?" _she read."See! Someone's supplying the kids there – or at least was – and my dad knew it. Plus, I bet you it's _still _going on, which means this entire set-up was bigger than threats and crappy construction. The gang is selling marijuana to kids all over the tri-state area."

"And the gang we are speaking of is the Noble Blacks, right?"

She nodded. "Absolutely. It explains why Chief Grindelwald wants Riddle in jail, and why he's keeping an especially close eye on him. He didn't realize the Noble Blacks were behind all of this dirty business until after my dad died." Although her expression didn't change when she talked about her father, Harry recognized saw something torn and small flash in and out of Hermione's clever eyes almost too fast to be seen – but he saw it and he knew. He'd seen the same thing in the mirror himself often enough to recognize it.

"Why does Grindelwald want you to know all of this again?" he said. He'd been astonished when Hermione told him the Chief had actually answered her questions yesterday, and dirtily thrilled by the truth behind her father's enigmatic death. It wasn't that he was glad the man was dead – he wasn't _sick_ – it was only the triumph of adding another puzzle piece to their growing collection, that sense of rightness getting bigger the more he learned about the nefarious Noble Blacks, expanding whenever Hermione came up with a new solution or idea that he never would've thought of on his own, seamlessly clicking together into the mystery, becoming clearer to them with every passing day...

The pieces were starting to come together at last. They just had to keep pushing harder to complete the entire puzzle.

"I think Grindelwald was hinting at me to pick up on the case where my dad left off," Hermione said slowly, her eyes thoughtful. "I know it's _unlikely_," she snapped at his expression, which Harry quickly tried to school into whatever would make her stop glaring daggers at him. She sighed after a minute. "But now that I know what happened to him," she said, voice soft, "and how similar his murder is to what happened to your parents and Sirius… I can't turn back on the Noble Blacks now. We have to find out why our parents and Sirius were targeted, and-" She broke off abruptly, gaze burning at what was left of her chai. Harry frowned.

"And…?"

"You don't have to do it," she said, the words mumbled into mush as she ducked her head and fidgeted with the cords of her sweatshirt. She pulled one end so the other shortened and scrunched the collar of her sweatshirt, before switching to the other side, and then repeating the process. "It's…dangerous." He scoffed. As if he didn't know that already. She scowled.

"Well, it _is. _And crazy. And impossible. But I want to bring the Noble Blacks to…to justice somehow, even if that's insane." She swallowed. "I mean, they're an entire organization who have probably gotten away with way more murders than we know about and worse. I don't know how I would get the evidence or even begin to use it, not to mention without getting caught and going out the way my dad did, but-" Her babbling cut off. She looked at him, desperate for reassurance. "I need to fix this. Somehow. You know?"

_Don't say yes, _Harry told himself, clenching his hands around his kneecaps under the table in a physical but futile effort at self-control. _For God's sake, you've already got her in this much trouble by helping you. Don't agree. Do. Not. Agree. _

"Yeah, I know," he burst out, and nearly clapped his hand over his mouth right after. What the hell?

"Really?" He nodded. Hermione grinned with relief and Harry blinked, surprised at the display of all her white teeth. He looked away, driving his fingers through his messy hair and thinking fiercely of Ginny's pink lips and Christmas and that he needed a haircut and cookies and soccer practice.

"So?" Hermione said expectantly.

He blinked at her. "What?"

Her expression melted from anticipative expectance to annoyance. She crossed her arms. "You weren't listening," she accused.

"Yes, I was," he said, flustered.

"No, you weren't."

"Was too."

"Was _not_."

He opened his mouth, then closed it. "I just remembered- I told Ron I would meet him to see a movie soon," he said abruptly, standing up and nearly upending the tiny table. Hermione caught her tea barely, raising her eyebrows at him in bewilderment. "Sorry," he muttered. Redness stormed over his cheeks. "Um. Sorry." He'd already said that. Shoot. "See you tomorrow."

"Ok." Hermione was looking at him like he'd just declared he was flying to the moon on a cheese-powered jetpack. He forced a smile at her – it felt stiff – and her eyes un-narrowed slightly. "Hogsmeade Square at twelve o' clock, right?" she asked, unconsciously tracing the lid of her steaming tea.

He nodded, his smile felt slightly more genuine now. "Right." She nodded back and reopened her laptop, leaning over the bright screen to tinker with whatever complex hacker mojo occupied her free time when Harry did not.

Harry walked out of the Three Tithes as fast as his legs would carry him, only breathing normally again once he was on the next street. Something was very wrong with him, he thought as he quickly sent a text to Ginny, asking her to meet him at their usual spot in an hour. Exhilaration poured through his veins at the discovery of the case files, the advancement of the mystery possessing him like a soul-sucking entity, so that he could hardly think of anything else for the rest of the day, even as Ginny nestled her head into his shoulder after an hour of fumbling and rushed kisses, tracing her peach-colored nails in tingling circles down his arms. But despite his efforts, his mind was elsewhere, with the Noble Blacks and Cygnus Black, wondering where fate would take him - and Hermione, he supposed - next, and if she had made any new discoveries in his absence. He wanted to be back in the Three Tithes again, to talk about the Noble Blacks with her as he could with no one else, and he cursed himself for being stupid enough to leave her early.

Ginny was kissing a nice soft path down his chest, slinking her long body to the floor in front of him. Harry didn't remember how she got there. He tried to pay attention, to clear everything out of his mind, like an eraser to paper.

Something was definitely wrong with him.

That, or something was very right.

* * *

There wasn't a plan. In fact, there wasn't even an outline of a plan. All Hermione had was a hunch to go on, and an objective she had no idea of how to achieve. The objective was ludicrous: by a miracle, deconstruct the infamous crime family that had arranged her father's – and countless others – murders for decades with some old case files. Her only connections to the Noble Blacks were the theories Dad left behind, what little cryptic information Chief Grindelwald felt like giving her, and Tom Riddle Black.

Hermione had a vague idea of where Riddle stood in the hierarchy of the Noble Blacks. Her idea was based on the way inmates – and even some guards – treated him at Azkaban. He was treated as if he was a dangerous, temperamental animal to be tiptoed around… but also respected. Rude, though never rebuked (except by Dumbledore, who didn't count, since the whimsical doctor seemed to operate on another mental scale entirely). He had _control. _He was used to being important. Powerful.

And as Fate would have it, he had all the answers to Hermione's questions.

The Azkaban group session was uneventful. Dumbledore posed insightful questions, Cuss swore, Crabbe and Goyle looked intimidating, Twitch clenched and convulsed in the corner of the circle, Dolohov acted like a pervert, and Riddle sat as far away from everyone in the room as humanly possible without sinking into the floor. The latter irked Hermione, as her earlier efforts to arrange the seating strategically beforehand had been nulled the minute Riddle walked in the room and swept right by the empty seat beside her. Out of the corner of her eye, she'd watched Riddle drag his chair to the back of the room and sit down, wanting to leap to her feet and yell at him for being such a theatrical brat and ruining her plans without even lifting a finger.

_It would be so much easier if Dumbledore just let me strangle him to death, _she thought, heaving an internal sigh.

Dumbledore opened session soon after that, but Hermione couldn't find it in herself to concentrate today – inevitably, her eyes were repeatedly drawn to the back of the room, toward one inmate in particular.

Now that she knew the Noble Blacks were responsible for Dad's death – and that by association, Riddle was too – she couldn't stop staring at the young mobster. Wanting to do unspeakable things to him. It wasn't the usual kind of unspeakable things teenage girls wanted to do to gorgeous, rogue older guys, either – the acts she envisioned were decidedly _violent, _involving her trusty Taser. And the sight of Riddle's face put bile in her throat rather than a typhoon of butterflies.

_Killer, _she thought fiercely, whenever human instinct told her his grey-blue eyes and hard jawline were beautiful, or if she caught herself mindlessly wondering at what the tattoo too small to read scrawled on his left wrist said. _He's a cold-blooded killer._

Only a sicko would shoot his uncle in the head and claim innocence. Self-defense, her butt.

Riddle glanced up, saw her staring, and raised a silver-dotted brow. She scowled back at him, pointedly turning around to face Dumbledore. Out of the corner of her eye, however, she saw the outline of his mouth widen with amusement.

"No, I don't think happiness is the goal here," Dumbledore was saying thoughtfully, in reply to a question from Dolohov. "In my opinion, happiness has never been something we can really achieve, for as soon as we reach it, we grow bored and happiness becomes something new and unreachable again. It's the flaw of mortality. Happiness is always unattainable, forever changing, evolving into something else – or maybe it's just a feeling that comes and go like any other. Sadness, remorse, pity, guilt, pride, triumph…" he listed.

"I'm not asking any of you for emotion, however. What I really want to see come out of all of you, as a product of our weekly meetings, is perspective. Your own perspective-" Dumbledore paused, glancing past the listening inmates and away again. "-and no one else's," he finished weightily.

A thoughtful pause ensued. The peaceful silence was broken, however, when Crabbe volunteered an ignorant comment, and the group quickly dissolved into numerous side conversations and debates. Riddle sighed loudly, rolling his eyes from his isolated corner. Hermione felt exasperated too. Dumbledore's positive psychology wasn't getting very far; their discussions had been going in circles for days now.

When session ended, Hermione was disappointed she hadn't had a chance to talk to Riddle again. She cleaned up the room with Dumbledore mechanically, thinking. How could she get Riddle alone without arousing suspicion? The only time she ever saw him were the three days a week spent here in the therapy group, there was no other opportunity to single him out if Dumbledore didn't have any more partner activities planned. That is, unless…

"Dr. Dumbledore," she said suddenly, distracting the doctor from a note he was jotting down on his clipboard. "Yes?" he responded after a moment, looking up and straightening his glasses, which were either perpetually crooked, or only appeared to be so due to Dumbledore's equally crooked nose. On any account, the doctor's fiddling didn't make much difference.

"Is the invitation to the cafeteria still open?" Hermione asked, striving for nonchalance, although she had the suspicion she entirely missed casual and only appeared gawkishly awkward. "Because I didn't bring anything to eat," she said, "and I'm – uh – getting kind of hungry…"

"Yes, of course," said Dumbledore, arcing his wispy eyebrows in an expression of benevolent surprise. "You could pick something up there and eat in the staff room, if you'd like-" he started to offer, but she interrupted him.

"That's alright," she said quickly. Too quickly, judging by the inquisitive look Dumbledore gave her."I' mean, I'll just eat there, I don't want to get too far away from the filing room, since I'm going there right after and I've got a bunch of work to do anyway," she blabbered, biting the inside of her cheek to stop herself from further word vomit. She knew she was acting strange, but couldn't seem to stop herself from it any more than she could wish her hair magically straight.

She'd already tried the latter. Multiple times.

"Well, if you prefer that," Dumbledore replied, shrugging. "If you change your mind, just ask one of the guards and they can bring you to the staff room – or even to my office, if you'd like to join me and Fawkes."

"Fawkes?" she questioned.

"My pet bird," he said solemnly. "He's a cross breed from South America. One of the last of his kind."

Hermione cocked her head, processing. "Oh, er, well…thank you for the invitation. I'll keep it in mind."

The guard waiting outside took her to the cafeteria without complaint at Dumbledore's request, a part of Azkaban Hermione had only been to once before and in passing. Shortly later, they arrived at a mess hall similar to the cafeteria at Hufflepuff High – at least, similar save for the hordes of overgrown men covered in tattoos crowding the linoleum tables, and haggard-faced security guards blocking the doorways and wielding heavy-looking nightsticks.

Hermione more or less convinced herself she wasn't nervous despite her increasing heart rate, and joined the lunch line winding in front of the inmate-staffed kitchen, glancing around the vast room for a sign of artfully styled black hair or an egotistical smirk. By the time she checked out, she hadn't seen either, to her frustration.

Hermione walked to a half-empty table. She'd started to sit down when a deep baritone voice suddenly spoke up from behind her, stopping and nearly startling her into dropping her tray. "Yo Granger."

Turning around, Hermione registered the powerful presence of the inmates from group, Crabbe and Goyle, with surprise. The enormous men towered over her like high-rise buildings, staring down at her phlegmatically. "Hi," she said, bemused, and painfully aware of her lacking muscle mass as she gazed at the strained bulges rippling underneath their vomit-colored jumpsuits. "Do you…er, need something?" she said slowly.

"Not us," Goyle said.

Crabbe cracked his neck loudly. "Voldemort does," he added.

"Who?" she said, a split second before remembering who Voldemort was. _Riddle_. "Never mind." She shook her head, frowning at them. "What does _he_ want?"

"To talk to you," said Crabbe dumbly. With a nod of his chin, he indicated something behind her. "He's sitting over there."

Hermione turned around and had to hunt the tables of orange suits for a moment before she finally found a small round table in the center of the mess hall. Sitting around it were more inmates from group therapy: Cuss, Twitch, Dolohov, and – of course – Riddle. There were two unattended trays on the table as well, which she presumed were Crabbe and Goyle's. _Why do they all sit together? _she thought, eyes narrowing at the oddity of it. She doubted the inmates had all bonded over Dumbledore's lessons in life philosophy.

"And what am I supposed to do? Get up and walk over to him?" she asked, annoyed despite the fact she had been about to do just that five minutes ago. But it was different when she was going to Riddle of her own accord, than when the self-entitled bigot was ordering his giant minions around to come get her. Who did he think he was, the Queen of Long Island? _Lazy... _She didn't bother to finish the thought.

Crabbe and Goyle didn't seem to know what to make of a teenage girl's rearing indignity. Once again, Hermione was reminded of Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum as the giant men looked back and forth at each other in searching confusion before answering her. "Well, yeah," Goyle said at last, scratching his egg-like head. "I think that's what he said."

Hermione glared at him. Crabbe cleared his throat, looking uncomfortable after a stretched minute in which she didn't let up. "Are you going to-?"

"No," she said, sitting down and picking up her limp hamburger. "If he wants to talk to me, he can come here." She shot them what was either a snarky smile or fierce tooth bearing, daring them to contradict her. Crabbe and Goyle left, glancing back at her a few times in confusion as they went. Ignoring the stares from the opposite side of the cafeteria, she ate her meal with satisfaction that wasn't caused at all by the lacking beef quality of her burger, although that smugness decreased as soon as she realized she had just butchered the perfect opportunity to talk to Riddle by running her mouth again.

Then ten minutes later, he appeared.

"Stubbornness is a highly unattractive quality," Riddle informed her, sitting on the bench across from her without invitation. His straight face was ruined by the amused quirk of his Cupid bow lips and the strange glint in his silver flint eyes.

"Then it's a good thing I'm not trying to attract anyone," Hermione replied, spearing a boiled shrunken carrot the color of sewer water and popping it in her mouth without breaking eye contact. She wasn't giving him an inch.

"You couldn't, unless you time travelled back to the 1960s." At her questioning look, he tapped his own perfectly waved black hair and explained, "Afros were in style then, no?"

Her eyes narrowed. "I'm sorry, I was under the impression you wanted to speak to me – and I was assuming it wasn't about my hair," she said drily.

"You assumed right." Riddle folded his hands and leaned forward, annoyance flashing across his face when she automatically slid back. "Please Granger, I'm not going to knife you in the cafeteria," he snorted, glaring at her with frosty silver eyes until she reluctantly moved back. Glancing away from her and surveying the mess hall tactfully, he casually said, "Look. I know you've been asking around about me-"

"You do?" she said, startled.

"Yes." He frowned at her interruption. "But I can answer some of your questions…in return for a few answers from you. I thought we could have a little _questionnaire _for fun." He smiled, but the effect was decidedly more cunning than reassuring. He looked like a cat planning to drown the canary in his bowl of cream. Albeit, a very attractive cat with obnoxiously high cheekbones.

Hermione also had the eerie premonition _she _was the canary in this scenario.

But his proposal was too good to be true. Riddle was "allowing her" to ask him questions? Not only _questions_, but the very questions she thought she would have to stealthily slip into conversation over weeks of side comments and intricate planning, only able to finally gain information from after hours of strain and careful scheming. Now, all she had to do to get answers was to in turn answer _his _questions.

Except Riddle might not answer her questions truthfully.

Except he most assuredly wouldn't.

Still, Hermione knew the opportunity was too good to pass up on – and what could Riddle possibly ask her that mattered? She hardly had anything to hide, except for an almost police record, and regionally popular antivirus program. "Deal," she said, and before he could say it, "Me first."

Riddle looked irritated he had been beat, but he nodded and waited for her. After a moment of thoughtful deliberation, she asked, "Do they work for you?"

His dark brows slanted, the chip of silver in his right brow gleamed at her like a coin. "Who?"

"Them." She pointed at the table Riddle had just vacated, where Cuss, Twitch, Crabbe, Goyle, and Dolohov sat. He glanced over his shoulder, iron eyes narrowing when he saw the four inmates she spoke of. Turning back around, he fixed her with an indecipherable stare. She didn't so much as blink. "Do they?" she pressed.

"No. They're friends." He didn't break eye contact, but she knew a liar when she saw one. She hid a smug grin.

"Alright," she said slowly, tapping her chin. "What about-"

"My turn," Riddle interrupted, and he didn't hesitate before demanding, "Where did you hear that name? The Noble Blacks."

"I didn't hear it, I found it."

His gaze sharpened. "Where?"

"One question at a time," she reminded, wanting to cackle evilly when Riddle appeared to restrain the urge to strangle her. This was much more fun than she'd originally imagined. She asked, "Is your father Cygnus Black?"

"Foster father," he corrected, with surprise. He seemed to be both puzzled and perturbed by her interest in his ancestry. Suspiciously he said, "How do you know about Cygnus?"

She shrugged, tracing a crack in the table, and hyperaware of his gaze on her all the while. "Family history research. I came across the name by chance," she lied, putting emphasis on _family _when she most definitely shouldn't have. If her pride was a fault, her aggressive need to best people at everything was going to be the death of her, she thought.

Riddle raised a brow. "Are you saying you think we're related?" he said, grinning.

She scowled. "_No- _and you already asked your question," she said snappishly. He lifted his hands in surrender, blinking innocently. "Why were you eavesdropping on Dumbledore and I yesterday?" she shot out, pleased to see Riddle taken aback by her demand. _Take that! _

But Riddle quickly recomposed himself, clearly a master of enigma, replying, "I wanted to see if you two would talk about me." He looked at her through his long, spider-leg eyelashes with barely concealed cockiness. "And you did. Why was that, by the way?"

She wavered before answering. "Curiosity isn't a crime."

"Really? Because you sound awfully defensive." His eyelashes fanned, long and spiky as raven feathers against the slightly unhealthy pallor of his face, and he slyly traced a slow circle on the back of her hand with his finger before she could yank it away. The touch shocked her, although not as much as Riddle's next words. "Have a crush, Granger?" he murmured.

"You wish," she snarled.

Riddle snickered, the sound low and ill-used, like rusted bike chains. Subconsciously, he licked the point of his canine tooth as he weighed her. "Whatever you say, sweetness."

"Don't call me that."

"Fine, _Gremlin_ then."

Hermione growled through her nostrils. He winked at her.

"Let's cut the crap," she said suddenly, having had enough, and straightening. Riddle sat back, smiling like he'd just won some sort of game – and who knew? Maybe he had. "I know all about your little organization," she declared, "_and_ what you did to your uncle-"

"You've got _theories, _and not a grain of evidence to prove them," he corrected lazily, waving his elegant hand carelessly. He was so unconcerned by her threats that he even reached over and stole one of her French fries off her tray. Hermione's mouth opened and shut as he chewed it, going on, "Evidence is what you want, but you're stupid to think you'll be getting that from me, or anyone else. People have been at this game far longer than you have, Troll Doll. You can tell your boss that, and thank your lucky stars I haven't already arranged your murder-" His voice lightened ironically. "-yet, that is."

Furious he'd called her stupid, Hermione grit her teeth and reigned in many curse words. Something else Riddle had said had tripped her up. _Your boss. _

Boss? What was he talking about? she thought, bewildered. Did he actually think she was part of some…some _gang, _like the Noble Blacks?

Huh. She could do something with this.

"Why not?" she asked, batting his sneaky fingers off her tray before he could kidnap more unsuspecting fries. Riddle scoffed.

"Because I'm not impulsive," he replied haughtily. "There are worse things than instantaneous death, and the price to pay for traitors is very high, I'll have you know – and painful."

Hermione had no idea what Riddle meant by _traitors_, but she gathered that either someone must have betrayed him, or the Noble Blacks were betraying somebody else. She didn't understand, and Riddle must have seen the confusion flicker across her face before she could hide it, because his expression suddenly changed from gloating to rapt. He leaned forward, searching her eyes intensely enough to make her heart skip more than one beat, and Hermione swallowed, cursing inwardly.

"What?" she said nervously, restraining the urge to pull back. His beauty was dizzying this close, and the waves of threat rolling off him ten times worse. He was so close to her, in fact, she was worried he was either about to kiss her or bash her head in.

"You don't know anything, do you?" he said abruptly. He sat back and his sharp jaw jutted with anger, he hissed, "Who the hell are you? _Are_ you even anybody? Or are you just a- an actual volunteer?"

Feeling highly awkward, Hermione shrugged one shoulder. His nostrils flared.

"Listen…Granger, I'm going to tell you a secret," Riddle started, so softly and quietly she strained to hear him. As she leaned in to listen, she had the sudden image of Little Red Riding Hood bending closer to the Wolf dressed as her grandmother, drawn in by the Wolf's false, sweet voice. _What big teeth you have, Grandmother… Yes, my dear, all the better to snap your twig-like bones and tendons in my mouth with… _

"I'm not a normal guy," said Riddle, almost generously. For once, Hermione had the feeling he wasn't being arrogant, but telling her the truth. "You can't trick and manipulate me, because you're feeling particularly nosy, or because you think I'm too stupid to catch onto you. _I_ have the ability to kill you, personally or indirectly, and as I see fit." His eyes hardened, suddenly more ice-blue than grey, and whatever remained of Hermione's naïve triumph, curled up and died.

"I don't care how high and mighty you think you are," he sneered, glaring at her. "In fact, I don't care about you at all. All that matters to me is that you know where the two of us truly stand – and that you mind your own business. Trust me, Granger, you don't want to know the things I've done, nor what I'm willing to do to those who…irk me. You are starting to irk me."

Under the table and her impassive staring, Hermione's hands curled into fists.

Riddle's death glare disappeared, he smiled plastically at her and got to his feet. "Consider this a friendly warning, Granger," he said chipperly. Plucking up a few more of her fries, he calmly strode away from the table, and Hermione watched him go, every inch of her prickling with heat.

If she thought she despised Riddle before, it was nothing compared to the thundering _rage_ and hatred she felt now. The jerk deserved whatever sentence the judge served him – and she fiercely hoped it was the right one. Life-long. Top imprisonment. She was going to do everything it took to make sure his High and Mighty Self stayed behind bars, until his grandchildren were nothing but dust in the earth, broken graves.

Riddle would be begging for mercy by the time she was through with him – and he wasn't getting any friendly warnings from her.

* * *

**AN: Chapter 10 is complete! Hurrah! Thanks to everyone who read and reviewed again, and please leave me your beautiful thoughts down below. ;) Next chapter: Hogsmeade Ave.**

**Kisses!  
ImmortalObsession **


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